


there must be more than blood (that holds us together)

by onetiredboy



Series: Hanahaki AU [1]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Angst, CWs within chapters, Hanahaki Disease, Mutual Pining, Other, Skippable Sex Scene, but this is a heavy fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:54:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 58,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28753212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onetiredboy/pseuds/onetiredboy
Summary: The first time Juno sees a petal in his hand after a particularly bad bout of coughing, he starts laughing.What the hell else is there to do?
Relationships: Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel
Series: Hanahaki AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2143794
Comments: 229
Kudos: 243





	1. dahlia

**Author's Note:**

> WELCOME, WELCOME.
> 
> I am so excited to unleash this fic upon the world. This AU has bounced around in my head for over a year, but I finally wrote it in November and have been editing since. I'm really proud of it and hope that all of you enjoy it too!
> 
> I want it to last, so I will probably post chapters every second day.
> 
> I would like to extend an extremely huge thank you to lexicals and danny for combing through all 58 THOUSAND words of this AU to make sure it was ready to post, and to elle, amy, and dav for providing their cheerleading as I pushed through editing it. And I would like to thank you, reader, because this chapter is nearly 10 thousand words long just on its own and is mostly a recap of canon, and if you get through it all you are a hero.
> 
> Title from There Must Be More Than Blood by Car Seat Headrest. 
> 
> CWs in general for this entire fic include: blood, coughing/gagging, laboured breathing, discussions of mortality/terminal illness, memory loss, discussion of medical procedures. while the fic includes an explicit scene, its its own chapter and entirely skippable. the graphic depictions of violence tag is mostly applicable to the final chapter. all other violence is canon-typical.
> 
> CWs for this chapter are ALL canon-typical, but include: early-s2-juno-typical self hatred, suicidal ideation, a dream sequence that could vaguely be unreality, alcohol, vague animal violence (kitty cat caper), sexual references, vomiting
> 
> If I missed anything, please let me know.

The first time Juno sees a petal in his hand after a particularly bad bout of coughing, he starts laughing.

What the hell else is there to do?

It’s the middle of the night in Hyperion City. The room is silent except for the ticking of his antique clock, the reverberation of his cough against the walls, and the reverberation of his thoughts against the inside of his skull. He hadn’t even made it to a bar or club tonight. Those are his worst nights. He fucking hates it here. He misses…

The petal is slick with his spit and soft in his fingers. It’s so red he thought it was blood, at first. Before he tasted the weird perfume in his mouth and realised whatever it was was solid, not liquid. When he flattens it out, he laughs drunkenly again.

A rose. Of fucking course.

Juno sinks down further into the worn-out brown cushions of his couch and lifts his glass to his lips. Then he holds it out in a silent cheer,  _ to Peter Nureyev. _ He usually doesn’t let himself say that name, not even in his thoughts. But whatever. It’s not like he’ll remember this in the morning anyway.

Then he rolls his eye and drinks until he passes out.

The next day, Maia King makes him investigate an exploding cat. As he throws the feline off the edge of the balcony and watches it spin for a glorious moment in the afternoon sun before it comes (quite literally) apart at the seams, he can't help but feel that he relates to the feeling of counting down towards a terrible, bloody end.

His will probably be a lot less poetic, he thinks to himself impassively as he watches innards slap wetly against the brickwork below. 

He sighs, and makes his way back to the office. He's halfway through drinking himself into oblivion -- hey, who knows, maybe alcohol is a weedkiller -- when the phone rings.

For a brief, stupid moment, Juno wonders if the person who invited him to Halycon park knows about his new disease. As if some wizard is going to step out of the woodwork and proclaim that they were the one to afflict it upon him and that they’d take it away only if he did their evil bidding.

Then he remembers who it  _ is _ that gave it to him, and he feels sick to his stomach.

That might be the flowers, though— he gets caught in the door to the office on the way to meet with this mystery person and coughs until his throat is raw and a flower petal is folded and slick in the palm of his hand before he can continue.

Halcyon park does not help. He stares down the long path of flowers lining the side of the concrete for a long moment and almost turns right back around,  _ certain _ that this is some kind of sick joke. A kid’s toy sits discarded underneath a bush, its dead eyes challenging him to walk forward.

He grew up here. He guesses it makes sense he's destined to face his death here, too.

Ramses O’Flaherty is not unlike a plant himself, in a lot of ways.

His skin is wrinkled and twists on his face like the bark of an ancient oak. His voice crackles like dry wood in a fire when he talks. His words catch into the kindling Juno keeps locked deep and far away in the furnace he’s taken care not to run for years and make him feel the dangerous first embers of something a lot like hope.

People who can make you feel like that are dangerous, Juno knows from experience. Hope isn’t a thing he can afford with a death sentence growing in his lungs. Human beings, though, are destined to repeat their mistakes. They fall into their roles in life and go through the motions no matter how many times they tell themselves they’ve changed, that they’ve broken free from the chains fate locked them in.

Juno’s role has always been a chump. 

“What’s that?” Juno asks. 

“A picture of your new eye,” Ramses says, and the fog of his breath in the early morning air looks like smoke.

He doesn’t tell Ramses about the petals. There’s nothing in it for Ramses if his newest employee is dying on the job, and hell, maybe it’s nothing. Maybe people coincidentally cough up petals all the time!

…Juno doesn’t think about it.

Juno does a great job of not thinking about it, it turns out. He’s always had shitty, awful lungs, so the only real difference between this and a particularly bad bout of asthma is that every now and then these fits come with a little surprise. He manages to hide it from Rita under layers of excuses and a lot of sick days and working from home, which he knows makes her suspicious, but he doesn’t know how to face her and tell her.

_ I’m sorry, Rita, I broke my own stupid heart, and now I’m dying because of it. _

On lonely nights he lies in his bed and thinks about Peter Nureyev.

Before this stupid thing happened, the thoughts he had were different. Guilty thoughts. Waking up to a Peter Nureyev beside his bed with angry eyes and fiery heat in the kisses he pressed to Juno’s mouth. In weaker moments, Juno would give into the temptation to touch himself and cry in the aftermath. 

So, you know. Not the healthiest behaviour. He’d still take that cycle of lust and guilt and self hate over and over and over again instead of this. Now, he lies awake and wonders if Peter Nureyev is out there dying, too.

That would rely on a lot of things. It would rely on Peter honestly having loved him, which… he could almost convince himself could be a lie, but…

His mind plays it like an unwelcome recording whenever his thoughts wander down this alley:  _ call me a fool if you like… _

It’s pain like Juno can’t begin to describe, imaging Peter Nureyev out there in the stars with a thorn in his lungs, and all of it  _ Juno’s fault _ . Fuck. He left Nureyev in that bed because he thought he’d be better off without him, that he had a life sprawling out ahead of him, that he’d chase the universe to its ends and see everything beautiful it had to offer, and that Juno would only slow him down.

Even when he tries to do something in the interest of someone else, he fucks them over. Another day, another body’s blood on his hands. 

It’s what makes him look into recovery methods for his disease. It’s not like hanahaki is unheard of, but it’s something kids talk about in schools and YA novels are written about, not something that tends to affect people in real life. Sure, everybody knows somebody whose cousin’s sister died after a divorce from the flowers that clogged up their throat and spread into their veins, but nobody’s actually met someone themselves. Like quicksand, or Bermuda’s wormhole — it’s the stuff of adventure novels, not reality. 

The only  _ real  _ way to get rid of the disease is to reunite with your lover and have them profess their love to you. Not only that, but you have to believe it when they say it for the curse to truly lift. That fucks both Juno and Nureyev over right off the bat — even if Nureyev could ever stand to look Juno in the eyes again, which he highly doubts, he would have to believe that Juno actually loves him, after everything. 

There’s surgery, as well. 

Juno reads over the words and feels his heart sink. The surgery comes at a cost — and not just financial, although even looking at the quotes from Mars’s finest doctors makes his cybernetic eye look like a throwaway purchase. When the flowers are removed, they remove all memories attached to the disease. That is, to survive, he would have to forget Peter Nureyev.

It’s not a question. Even after everything that happened, after Miasma, after his eye, after he ditched him in his bed like a cheap lay, Peter Nureyev is still the best thing that has ever happened to Juno Steel. He can’t throw that away. Even if it kills him.

Anyway, he thinks, this is the bed he made for himself. This is what he did to both of them. He has to live with the consequences of his actions. For a while, anyway. If Miasma’s bomb didn’t do the trick, this would. When a door closes…

Something else he finds out during this period of research: thinking about Nureyev makes his coughing worse. He only has to spend thirty seconds thinking about sharp teeth and bottomless, sparkling eyes, or lithe fingers and a low muttering voice before he ends up doubled over, his body shaking with effort and pain bringing tears to his eyes.

He kills Yasmin Swift at the top of Andromeda’s peak and considers, for a brief moment, jumping after her.

Then he imagines the headline  _ son of Sarah Steel found after suicide at Northstar,  _ and it makes him hesitate just long enough for the cart to tip over the peak and make him scream his lungs out all the way to the bottom.

He reaches the end of the ride, finds the nearest bin, and vomits, and then coughs and coughs and coughs and coughs.

“Mista Steel!” Rita comes hurtling out of a service door and straight into his arms, “I’m so glad you’re alright!” 

While Rita’s face is still stuffed into his shirt, Juno glances into the bin and picks out one, two, three petal-shaped reasons why he absolutely is not alright. He knows he should tell her. He doesn’t tell her much these days, or ever really, but he probably owes it to her to give her time to prepare for his death.

“You can count on me, boss,” Rita is saying, “You can always count on me.”

Before Juno has even a second to feel the yawning chasm of guilt split him open, Lorenzo Vega clears his throat and then it’s back to business. 

He manages to keep it hidden from Ramses right up until he does that awful fucking stake out watching the museum. He’s sitting on the roof one morning, counting beaks on a family of Martian sparrows that are staring evenly back at him like they think his eye would make a nice shiny addition to their nest, when he gets the call.

“Juno.” 

Ramses' voice curls into him like a root. Juno grunts.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were dying?”

Juno groans long and low, and slumps down against the roof of the building, “I hate this stupid eye.”

Ramses’ chuckle always sounds like he’s won some secret bet with the universe. Like he’s predicted every step of every day out and gets to sit back and watch the chips cash in, watch everybody move into the spots he’s planned for them. Juno knows he’s probably being played, but hell, at least he’s being played for…

For good. Or something. These days Juno doesn’t really know if he cares, anymore.

“I’ve arranged for you to have a surgery on Thursday afternoon, four o’clock sharp. Do not be late, Juno. A car will collect you on Wednesday night.”

“No,” Juno sits up suddenly, and the family of Martian sparrows scream at him with their human-like voices,  _ No! No! No! _

Ramses does not laugh. Ramses says dead silent for a long moment, and then he says, “I am not having my partner in good kill himself over a broken heart.”

“You don’t get it, okay?” Juno spits down the comms at him, and finds himself shaking.

_ Caution _ , the voice living in the back of his brain advises him,  _ You are acting out of protocol.  _ Juno wants to rip it out of his head even if it takes a quarter of his brain with it. Roots, roots, roots. In his brain, in his lungs, in his sentimental heart.

Ramses speaks to him like he is speaking to a child. “Juno,” he says again, evenly. “I cannot lose you now. Hyperion city cannot lose you now.”

Juno wants to throw his comms off the roof. “No, Ramses,” he says, “You keep playing that card, that— that idea that I’m some goddamn hero, the only one who can get you through the election. But the truth is that I die, and you find another stooge to fill your place. This city goes on without me. I’ll do whatever the hell you want up until my body gives in on me, okay? You’ve got me. I’ll keep working towards the future I don’t even know if I believe in, and maybe I’ll even get to see a glimpse of it before I kick the bucket. I don’t care. All that matters is that I die on my terms, Ramses.”

“Juno—” Ramses says, warningly, and Juno hangs up from the call. 

He starts shaking. Then he starts crying, and he cries until his throat is raw and his face is stiff with the tracks of drying tears. Then he coughs and coughs and coughs and coughs. In the tree across the road, the family of Martian sparrows copy the sound.

Ramses doesn’t come to pick him up, at least. In his calls, his voice is sharp and disapproving. Juno just keeps working. His eye gets an update that allows him to suppress his coughs.

He doesn’t use it until he’s in the Museum of Colonised History. The lights are all off, and the outline of Pilot Pereyra is just visible in the dark when Juno feels something start to crawl its way up his oesophagus. 

_ Warning,  _ the voice in the back of his head says calmly into his ear,  _ this course of action will reveal your presence.  _

“So stop it,” Juno growls under his breath, and Khan hits him lightly.

There is a pleasant chime, and the urge just… evaporates and is gone. 

For a while Juno thinks he’s found his way out. He uses the feature another four or five times before he finally gets out of danger and back home to his apartment. Everything seems fine while he pours himself a drink, sends Khan and Ramses the recording he took on his THEIA of Pilot and the Piranha, sits on the couch, and stares out at the glittering skyline of Hyperion City, thinking about Barton Pollock. 

Then he feels the urge to cough, and it comes up his throat too fast for even his cybereye to catch it. The second the first cough is out of his mouth he knows it’s different to the ones he’s had before. Then he  _ really  _ knows it’s different, because his body shakes so violently that he sinks off the couch and onto his knees on the floor. He coughs and coughs and coughs, until he can taste blood at the back of his mouth, and he keeps coughing. Tears leak from the corner of his eyes, down his face, and splash onto his hands, and he gasps for air in the seconds before the feeling of his lungs and throat contracting. It doesn’t stop until he feels something thick and heavy in his throat, and then he gags, like a cat with a goddamn hairball, while a package of petals comes sliding up his windpipe and out in a wet, disgusting mush onto the carpet.

For a long moment the only noise is the ticking of his antique clock and the raspy sound of him gasping down lungfuls of air. “What the  _ hell _ ,” he says to himself when he has his breath back, his hoarse voice echoing off the walls, and for the first time he feels genuinely afraid.

“Juno,” Ramses says in that same disapproving tone over the comms line, twelve hours later, “Surely you didn’t think the THEIA Spectrum could just wave away your disease?”

“No,” Juno says petulantly, although alright, maybe he hadn’t thought very hard about it and ended up with a mental picture of it doing roughly exactly that. “I just didn’t expect it would make it  _ worse. _ ”

“You can’t just  _ stop _ hanahaki disease in its tracks,” Ramses says. “Suppressing the urge to cough makes it build back up in your lungs. It’s not an advisable course of action, Juno. It’s a last-minute one.”

“You didn’t think it’d be worth putting that in the update notes?” Juno snarks.

“Quite frankly, I thought you were smart enough to put two and two together. You never fail to surprise me with your passion for wilful ignorance, Juno.” 

“Well that’s nice,” Juno mutters at his shoes, “Would hate to be predictable.”

Ramses’ voice changes with his next words, “Surgery is still an option. Your disease is in its early stages, but time is running out. A month from now, and the roots will be too deep to remove, even by the finest of doctors. Juno, you don’t have to kill yourself over—“

“We’ve had this conversation, Ramses,” Juno says, poison in his words. “You don’t get to decide what decisions I make about my own goddamn life.”

“Perhaps not,” Ramses agrees, “But I get to make decisions about what I think would serve the greater good, Juno. And when it comes down to doing the most  _ good _ …”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You’re gonna, what, drug me and operate on me without my consent?”

“I’ve had enough of people like you not taking the help I offer them in my life,” Ramses says, and for a moment he sounds almost dangerous. “Enough of people being so  _ blinded  _ to reality, so self-absorbed in their suffering, that they refuse to make the choices they know are better for them.”

Juno is silent. He waits for Ramses to continue.

“Don’t leave me without a choice, Juno,” Ramses says, and hangs up the comms.

Juno sits in his office desk and buries his head in his hands. He feels the shape of his cybernetic eye under his eyelid and wonders just how deep the contract that came with it goes. Ramses owns the eye, but if the eye owns his body… then maybe Juno doesn’t have a choice, at this point. Maybe he sold himself once and for all.

And what the hell, right? Juno’s been a toy all his life, pulled by this person’s strings and then that. All the way back to Oldtown, with… All the way up to swallowing that pill, with…

Juno Steel doesn’t get to keep things to himself. He’s public use, always has been, an idiot with a shitty set of guiding principles and a heart that won’t stop getting itself manipulated no matter how hard he tells himself this time will be the last. He doesn’t get to keep his brother. He doesn’t get to keep his fiancé. He doesn’t get to keep his own goddamn memories, if it means pulling him back off the ground and keeping him marching forward to the beat of someone else’s agenda. 

Juno wallows for a bottle and a half. Coughs up a petal. Goes home. 

A few days later, he calls Alessandra Strong. Tells her he’s gotten in over his head, and then packs a bag and heads down to Oldtown. Outside the entrance to the subway system, Ramses calls him and begs him to take the surgery one last time.

_ I hired you looking for a bodyguard. I found a partner in good. Just think about it, Juno. I don’t want to be done with you yet. _

For a moment, it’s almost enough. Juno wavers on the spot, and just before he hangs up he says, “Tell you something: if you win, O’Flaherty, I’ll do it.”

“Then I’ll see you after the election, Juno,” Ramses says, and disconnects the call. 

He’s stupid if he thinks he can keep his disease from Alessandra, and he knows it. He tries not to think about it as they descend into the bowels of Oldtown. He can probably fake asthma well enough that she won’t notice him coughing into his palm and throwing something out of it again when she’s not looking. They’ll only be down there for a few hours, if things go to plan. And if they don’t, he always has…

_ Caution, _ the THEIA Spectrum advises as he leans a little too close to a clump of what looks like an entire civilisation of mould on the wall,  _ this course of action may cause you physical harm. _

“Shut up,” he mutters, and Alessandra gives him the look she’s been giving him for the past ten minutes, the one that makes it clear to him she thinks he’s at least lost it a little bit, and that she’s trying to figure out whether or not she trusts him enough to be here.

“What?” he snaps at her, and she looks away from him.

“Footprints,” she toes the mark in the dust with her boot.

“Probably just teenagers,” Juno dismisses, and scans them with his eye, “Not the right size.” 

“What are we doing down here, Juno?” she asks him, and Juno has never been more grateful to hear that question in his life. He starts his story about the Free Dome. 

She fights him at every turn, like he knew she would, and when they wind each other up enough she finally breaks and snaps.

“I’m engaged, Juno.”

Juno’s world, momentarily, stops. He stares at her in the dim underground light, her jaw set and her gaze hard. An ephemeral memory of what they almost had, seven months ago, comes and goes. Juno swallows, and tries not to think too hard about how different his life would’ve been if he’d never given up Alessandra Strong for Peter Nureyev, “Oh. Got engaged in seven months, huh? That’s… fast.”

“We were in the Solar Military together years ago. I thought she was dead, but…”

But other people’s lives aren’t a comedy of tragedies. Juno nods shallowly, “Cool. Cool.”

Luckily, Juno doesn’t get long to beat himself up about every relationship he’s ever failed at in his life, because they get caught by Mayor Pereyra. Unluckily, they get caught by Mayor Pereyra.

“I need you to remember what I told you earlier,” Alessandra pleads with him just before they get shoved in the pod, “Dying is—” 

“Shut up and get in the pod,” the Piranha interrupts, and Juno and Alessandra don’t really have much of a choice.

Dying is easy. Well, she’s definitely right about that. Hell, Juno didn’t have to try at all, and now he’s sitting in the backseat of a pod to probably nowhere, trapped with two murderers and a P.I. who he knows would throw him under the bus if push came to shove and can’t even blame her for, with a goddamn botanical garden growing in his lungs.

Right on queue, a tickling urge rushes up his throat and hits the back of his mouth. He coughs once and panics, slapping a hand over his mouth. He squeezes his eyes shut and begs to  _ make it go away, make it go away, make it— _ and the THEIA beeps pleasantly and makes it go away.

When he opens his eyes again, Alessandra is staring at him. There’s something in her gaze he doesn’t like. An investigator’s gaze. Goddamnit. This is the kind of thing that made him stop going to those lousy P.I. potlucks Rita used to force him along to. Nothing good about a group of people who all know the tell-tale signs of a liar.

“You alright, Juno?” Alessandra asks, and her voice is low and even and he knows she’s saying  _ You are not alright, and I know it, and I want to know if you’re going to lie to me about it, because then I’m not taking my eyes off of you. _

Juno has no choice. He’s not letting the people here know he’s dying because of… because of some stupid goddamn disease children have nightmares about. 

“Yeah,” he says, “I’m doin’ just fine Alessandra, in fact, this is one of the best air-tight capsules I’ve ever been trapped in against my will in my whole life. Thinking they could do a little better on the decor, but all around I figure I’ll leave it a healthy four point eight— four point nine? Four point nine stars out of five on the review.”

“Will you shut up already?” the Piranha snaps, and Alessandra glares at Juno and leans back against the wall. She looks him slowly up and down and he knows that look is searching for the answer to his illness somewhere. Well, she’s not going to get it. Not before he dies first.

Which, he thinks, as a second urge to cough starts to climb up his throat and he bats it away with the THEIA without thinking, might be a little more likely than it seems.

Every time he has to use the THEIA to push down his petals he can feel his chest growing tighter. He starts counting the impulses, and looses track after ten, and then he starts to get really, really fucking scared.

What happens if he pushes it down enough that it just festers inside of him? What if, when he lets it go, it just kills him then and there? How long can he last by pushing it down like this? Is he making it grow stronger inside of him, pushing its roots further into the lining of his lungs and reach into his blood? Maybe he won’t make it until the end of this goddamn election.

“Are you alright, Juno?” Alessandra keeps asking, so often that the Piranha accuses her of speaking in code and she’s forced to keep silent, sending him little suspicious glances instead.

He falls asleep after the second day of travel in their pod, and then things fall apart, because of course they do.

He wakes up to a black room. 

“What the hell…? Why’s it so goddamn dark?” he tries to look around himself, “Where am I, even?” 

Then he hears it: the sound of ragged, laboured breathing.

“Jesus hell,” he scrambles to try and find a light in his pockets, before he remembers the machine in his head, “THEIA, Nightvision Mode.”

Nothing. He feels his throat go tight, “THEIA? Ben—Benzaiten, is that you? I’m coming, alright? I’ll get someone. Just—goddamnit, hold on!”

“Juno...” 

Juno stops in his tracks. His throat closes over, and in that moment, the room he’s in lights up.

Peter Nureyev lies in a pool of flower petals. There is blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, and his eyes are dazed and unfocused. Then he wavers in Juno’s vision, because Juno’s eyes fill with tears the second he sees him.

“Nureyev.” 

He can suddenly move again. He runs to Nureyev’s side, collapsing to his knees on the ground and rolling him onto his back, “Nureyev, oh my God, what happened to you?”

Nureyev gives him a bittersweet smile, “You, my dear.”

“No,” Juno whispers, “No, you’re stronger than this—”

“I always knew I’d die a dramatic death one day,” Nureyev’s voice is broken and hoarse, “Though I have to say I’d imagined more laserfire and sirens, and less…” he pauses for a cough, “petals and perfume.”

“I’m sorry,” Juno pleads, and feels hot tears fall down his face, “Nureyev, I’m so, so sorry. I just keep hurting people one after the other and I never wanted to hurt you, I—no. No, no, you can’t die here.”

Nureyev smiles at him again, “I’m afraid I might not have a choice.”

“You can’t die here,” Juno begs again, and then he leans down and cups Nureyev’s face in his hands, “You can’t die here, because I love you.”

He leans down and presses his lips to Nureyev’s, urgently, “I love you,” he says again, and kisses him again, “I’ve always loved you, I loved you from the moment you walked in my goddamn door, and I loved you when you bet my life for that stupid goddamn card game and I loved you in that tomb, because even despite all the pain and everything we went through, I just had to look at you and I knew everything would be okay. I loved you when I left you, Nureyev, and I’ve loved you ever since, even if it’s killing me, I— _ mnnf _ —”

Nureyev surges up to kiss him and Juno collapses back into him, pressing him down into the floor. He tastes like perfume, and dirt, and blood, and Juno never ever wants to let him go.

“Oh, Juno,” Nureyev says when they part. He reaches up and traces the side of Juno’s face with his hand, and then a pained look crosses his face and he sighs, “If only this were real.”

“What?” Juno asks, and suddenly a rising panic sets in the bottom of his stomach, “What the hell do you mean, Nureyev, what’s going—”

“I don’t have much time,” Nureyev interrupts, “I have to leave you.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Juno asks again, his voice breaking, “Nureyev. Don’t—please, please hold on, I can’t do this without you. Everything’s so wrong, and I’m so scared, and I don’t know how to keep going when every day of my life I think about what I  _ did _ to you, and you’re out there in the universe somewhere dying because of me, and I-I-I—”

“Shh, shh,” Nureyev leans up and kisses him again. Juno moans and holds him close, tangling his fingers into his hair and keeping his eyes closed shut like it might make all of this more real. He can feel something happening under his fingers, and when he opens his eyes at last he can see that Nureyev is dissolving into flower petals in his hands.

“No,” Juno says, “No, no, no—”

“I’m sorry, Juno,” Nureyev says, “I am. I wish it didn’t have to be like this. For what it’s worth, I l—”

He disintegrates into flower petals in Juno’s arms before he gets to finish the sentence, and then the floor under Juno’s knees gives out and he’s falling, falling, falling—

“Steel!” 

Juno snaps his eyes open and rolls over, his body shaking with the force of his coughs. He gasps for air, and then spits blood, and still he keeps coughing. He hears Alessandra and the Piranha yelling at each other, and the cacophony rises in his ears like the lump he can feel rising in his throat, and he gags and spits out half a whole flower into the bottom of the pod.

Then it subsides, and he collapses.

There’s a moment of silence.

“Eugh,” Mx. Pereyra says. 

“Now hold on a minute,” the Piranha says, and then she starts to chuckle. Then she laughs, throwing her head back against the wall. “You’re telling me Mr. Tough Lady’s got flower spitting disease? This is too rich.”

“Shut the hell up,” Juno growls.

“Or what?” the Piranha smiles at him with serrated teeth. “C’mon, P.I., who was it?” Her beady eyes slide from Juno’s face to Alessandra’s, and she grins, “Oh, don’t tell me it was  _ you _ …”

Juno glances at Alessandra and catches the look on her face, stuck somewhere between horror and pity. “Juno,” she says, and Juno cuts her off.

“Not you, ‘Lessandra,” he grumbles, and looks away from her, “Just drop it.”

“Juno, I didn’t know,” Alessandra says anyway, “I wouldn’t have said that stupid shit about dying if—”

“Hey, don’t you usually shut her up if she talks to me?” Juno directs to the mayor, who leans back in their seat and smiles.

“Sure, when she was being annoying. Now  _ this?  _ This is quality entertainment.”

“Great,” Juno says, “Goddamn fantastic.”

“Fine,” Alessandra says, “I’ll drop it.” 

“And there goes the entertainment…” Pilot sighs, “Doesn’t anyone wear a watch anymore? What time is it?”

“For the fourth time, I do,” Alessandra growls, “It’s two A.M.”

Juno tunes out of the ensuing argument and stares at the spit-covered rose lying by his side. He reaches out and pokes it, and vividly remembers the feeling of Peter Nureyev’s lips against his.

“Steel,” Alessandra turns to him when he starts coughing again, and he holds up a hand to gesture for her to wait it out. No petals come out, this time, but the taste of blood makes him grimace.

“Hold on, I got a lozenge in here somewhere,” she searches through her bag, and when she leans over to pass him the little lolly she says, under her breath, “Undercrows have been extinct for three hundred years.”

“Hey now, hey now,” Pilot swallows down a mouthful of nutrient brick, “No need for secrets. Why don’t you tell the whole class what you two troublemakers are thinking about, hm?”

“I was just giving him some… personal advice, okay? About his disease,” Alessandra says, and Juno bristles. He resents this being their new scapegoat topic, but it’s not like he’s in a position to complain.

“Hm,” Pereyra says, clearly not convinced. They open their mouth to say more, and at that exact moment, the free domer jingle comes to Juno’s rescue. “Shh! That’s it! Another Free Domer message! We must be there!” 

The message doesn’t say that they’re there. The message says they’re just a few hours off, before Marshall cuts in and shuts down the ride anyway. They step out into an old tunnel with spongy walls and stalactites dripping in slime over their heads. 

They all get forced down the end of the tunnel, with nothing but Marshall D’arc’s increasingly unhinged voice to drag them through. Pilot straps themselves to the most repulsive chair Juno’s ever encountered in his life, and Juno’s met a lot of chairs. Then the Piranha makes him stop the thing. 

Then Pilot straps  _ him  _ to the chair. 

Through the pain burning in him and the dizziness slowly descending upon him, Juno can see why this would be a tempting way to go. No need to worry about dying from stupid flower spitting disease. His gravestone wouldn’t say suicide, or  _ died of a broken heart _ , like many other hanahaki sufferers’ do. His would…

Say nothing, probably. He would die here and his body would be left discarded as part of the train tracks, and he would never get to know how everything here ended. Never get to see the result of what he was fighting for. 

Juno decides to live. And just like that, with the anger coursing through his veins and the blood coursing  _ out  _ of them, it suddenly seems so simple: he can’t die. Not just here, but ever. 

He’d said to Ramses that he wanted to die on his own terms. Well, that meant not letting Peter goddamn Nureyev kill him from over half a universe away, too. So he loses some memories, so what? He’s not done with this city. And after he gets out of here, and Ramses wins the election, he’ll keep doing good. For as long as it takes to pay back his debts to the world. 

Pilot Pereyra forces him forward, and Juno grits his teeth and bears it. He just has to get through this day, this journey, this next Free Domer challenge, and then he can start to make up for all the long, long time he’s spent so deep in his own self pity.

Goddamn convenient, isn’t it? To have all these thoughts about finally getting your life on track, for maybe the first time in all the years you’ve been crawling around the godforsaken galaxy, just on the day everything goes to hell.

Always destined to fall into the same traps, is Juno Steel. Hope, belief, betrayal, heartbreak. Rinse and repeat. It feels like every time it happens, it takes a little more out of him. If he had any choice in the matter, he’d have stopped being able to hope decades ago. But that’s part of the joke the universe makes out of him: even when he wants to die, he can’t.

That’s his first thought when the man in the leather jacket finds him passed out in the Martian desert. There’s red splotches of blood splattered on the sand around him, but then again it could just be part of the light show his frying neurones have been giving him for the last half an hour or so. 

Out of all the ways he could’ve gone, this could’ve been one of the nicer ones. Instead, he gets literally thrown over a shoulder, and driven to the Cerberus province. 

Buddy Aurinko has a stunning mane of curly red hair and a smile on her face like she’s already won the game Juno doesn’t know he’s playing yet. That makes three people Juno knows who can smile like that, and the track record for how they’ve left him in the grand scheme of things doesn’t make him feel very confident about her chances of having his best interests at heart. 

“You’ve just spent a few months being someone else’s stooge — or thirty-eight years, depending on how you count it,” she says, and Juno just about snaps.

But as it turns out, the job goes smoothly. He ends up standing on top of the lighthouse of the Cerberus province, at sundown. Then after sunset.

Is it bad that Juno sort of feels like it’s satisfying this way? That Buddy Aurinko doesn’t get her happy ending?

The fuck kind of question is that— of course it’s bad, but hell, Juno’s had about all he can stand of the universe shoving in his face how easy it would’ve been for his life to  _ not _ turn out the way it did, how easily other people get their happy endings handed to them on a silver platter. 

“All right Bud, show’s over, time to go home. You and I only got one eye apiece and neither one of us can afford to lose—”

Which is just about when the universe decides he’s had a bit too long to feel moderately satisfied about the world. 

Buddy and Vespa. Vespa and Buddy. Vespa’s standing on the railing of the lighthouse, her hood down and her green hair shaved on one side, with the other side flopping over her face. She jumps down onto the platform in front of Buddy, and the look on their faces…

For a moment, Juno can’t even be upset about it. The way they look at each other… it’s the kind of thing Juno isn’t sure he’s ever been able to have. The kind of moment that freezes the whole goddamn universe and makes it all seem, for just a moment, like it’s going to turn out alright for everyone.

Belief, betrayal, heartbreak… hope. The cycle starts anew. 

“Well. A happy ending,” the man in the big jacket says, and Juno realises his face is wet.

“Yeah,” he chokes out, and the man gives him a look.

“Are you crying, Juno?”

Juno opens his mouth to vehemently deny it, and what comes out instead is a cough. He coughs so hard he doubles over, and has to put a hand against the wall. And then he keeps coughing, his chest aching, and he coughs until he spits a mouthful of petals out on the metal deck of the lighthouse.

When he glances back up, Jacket is staring at him.

“You have hanahaki,” he says.

“What?” Juno puts on his most horrified look, “I do? Gee, I hadn’t fucking noticed.”

Jacket blinks at him impassively, “It seems unlikely that you hadn’t noticed. You are owed payment for your services. We’ll leave tonight. We may still be able to reverse the disease.”

Juno swallows down the taste of roses, and nods his head shallowly, “Right. Sure. Tonight, fine.”

The drive to Hanataba’s clinic sets him on edge. The experience he gets within it changes his life, but you know? That’s becoming alarmingly par for the course as far as things Juno Steel gets tangled in goes. If there’s a prize for most epiphanies one person can have in a single year, Juno figures he’s got a pretty good shot at winning it. 

When he wakes up from… everything… there are three things left beside the bed. One was the last page of Hanataba’s instructions, the second the THEIA Spectrum, and the third, a handwritten note. 

_ You are alive. This is the gift you have been given,  _ the last page of Hanataba’s instructions says.  _ Use it as you see fit. _

It’s a nice sentiment. Juno’s glad he sleeps on it before he reads the note that Jacket left him.

He wasn’t able to stop the disease. He was able to trim some of it back, give him maybe another few months on top of the few he has left, but it’s too far into his lungs to fully extract now. The course of the disease was sped up courtesy of yours truly, the THEIA Spectrum — and by proxy, Jack Takano. 

Juno is so angry he thinks he could scream. So he takes a moment, refocuses all that energy, and heads back to Hyperion City. 

The whole long way home, he drafts what he wants to say to ‘Ramses O’Flaherty’. It plays out in a hundred different scenarios, from shouting down his goddamn mayoral office to simply slapping him across the face and leaving him with a few more scars courtesy of the Steel family.

But hey, closure is for other people, apparently. 

He can’t stay in Hyperion after that. He knows he just… can’t. If he’s only got a year left to live if he’s lucky, he wants to spend it doing something on his own terms for once. But before he can do that, there’s something… something big he has to do. 

It takes him a few weeks to be able to do it. Then he invites Rita around for a ladies’ night and sits her down.

“Mista Steel, you ain’t never done somethin’ this nice for me before!” she exclaims when she sees the way he’s set out the room for her, full of blankets and big packets of snacks of all kinds on the floor, “This is some real special treatment. I hope you know I’m gonna be expecting this standard from now on. This whole time I just thought you didn’t know any better!”

There’s a lot to unpack just from that — the way she’s come to expect poor treatment from him. Fuck, even if he had another two hundred years to live, he’s not sure what he could possibly ever do to make it up to her.

He waits until they finish the movie. He specifically chose one that had no romance in it— he couldn’t run the risk of triggering a cough and leaving her to find out the bloody way what it is he needs to tell her. It’s some stupid stream about a vampire shark detective who busts a were-octopus crime ring. Or something. Juno doesn’t really pay attention. 

She cuddles up into his side, and he holds her close, burying his nose into her hair. If this is the last chance they’ll get to be… normal, he doesn’t want to waste a second.

When the movie ends, she shuffles in his grip, “Wow Mista Steel, that sure was something, dontcha think?” she asks, and then she stops abruptly.

“Mista Steel,” she says, “Are you crying?”

Juno sniffs, “Um. Rita…”

“Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no, cause Mista Steel, I ain’t gonna lie to you, I got real worried when you invited me over here. I didn’t mean it, only you have a real nasty habit of not telling me when things are wrong and especially in being all nice to me just before you do something stupid like disappear without me getting a chance to even say goodbye and—please tell me you ain’t in danger again Mista Steel, I only just got you back and I can’t lose you again— oh no!”

She screeches ‘oh no’ like that because Juno starts crying in earnest— large, heavy sobs, and he folds on the couch so that his head is on her shoulder. He wraps his arms around her back and hugs her close to him.

“Mista Steel! What’s wrong?!” she asks, “Please, you’re starting to worry me. You ain’t… dying, are you?”

He knows she’s expecting him to jerk back and ask her where the hell she got that idea from so that she can go on a spiel about some stupid stream and distract him from this terrible feeling until he’s feeling alright again, but there’s nothing left for it. He nods into her shoulder, and feels her go stiff in his arms.

“Juno,” she says, “That ain’t a funny joke. I mean it, you better quit this right now. It’s not funny.”

“I’m not joking, Rita,” Juno says, and leans back from her. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so goddamn sorry. I’ve done nothing but treat you wrong ever since I’ve known you, and now I finally want to get better, and want to show you how much you mean to me, and I haven’t got much longer left, I—”

“Stop that!” Rita shouts at him, “You stop that right now, Mista Steel, I don’t believe you. I can’t believe you. You can’t be dying on me, okay? Not after this— we saved the day and everything, you and me, Mista Steel.”

Juno shakes his head, “I’m sorry, Rita. I’m so sorry. I was so caught up in my goddamn head I thought it was better if I never told you, but I’ve made everything so much worse. I don’t know why I convinced myself you’d be fine if I died—”

Rita grabs him by both the shoulders, her tiny fingers gripping surprisingly hard at him, “I’m telling you to stop joking, okay? Whatever it is, you and I can stop it, okay? We got through everything together, between those nasty mind eatin’ robots, and— and— and anyways you seemed fine then and you’ve seemed fine this whole time and I  _ ain’t  _ lettin’ you reveal you’ve had a big bad illness this entire time 'cause only all the worst streams end that way, Mista Steel!”

Juno goes to say something, and he starts to cough. He coughs and coughs and coughs, and Rita screams, and he keeps coughing until his body jolts and he spits petals onto the couch cushions.

“Juno!” Rita jumps up off the couch, “This ain’t happening! You ain’t got flower spitting disease, Mista Steel, it just ain’t right, it ain’t fair! We gotta get you some surgery! I can pay for it, my Momma left me a whole bunch of money just for emergencies and this seems like a real emergency, Mista Steel.”

“It’s too late,” Juno croaks out, and Rita sinks to her knees beside the couch cushions. 

“Well that’s ridiculous, it’s never too late, Mista Steel! That’s what all the streams say! We just need to get you to a real good doctor and—”

“I already tried,” Juno emphasises, “I already tried to get it out, okay? That’s part of the reason I was gone so long, I… I was in surgery for my eye and I tried to get rid of the roots, but there’s nothing I can do. It’s too late for me.” 

Rita falls very silent after that. She stares at him long and hard, her big brown eyes getting shinier and shinier behind her horn-rimmed glasses. 

“Juno…” she says, “But… why? Why didn’t you  _ say  _ something?” 

“I don’t know,” Juno whispers. “I don’t know.

“I didn’t even know you was seeing someone, maybe if I did I coulda— coulda—”

“There’s nothing you could’ve done, Rita,” Juno says, “You barely knew him, and you wouldn’t have been able to stop me falling for him. Wouldn’t have been able to stop me getting in this mess after that. One way or another, it would’ve happened.” 

“It was that Mista Agent Rex Glass guy, wasn’t it?” Rita asks softly, “That was why you disappeared for so long. You were with him, weren’t you boss?” 

Juno’s throat closes over. Wordlessly, he nods.

“You fell in love with him?” she asks, “And you didn’t even say anything to me?”

“I didn’t know how to deal with it,” Juno mutters, “I haven’t believed in love since… since Diamond, and I didn’t know how to deal with what I was feeling. Obviously.”

“What happened?”

“I blew it, Rita,” Juno says. “I fucked things up with him really badly. I got him almost killed, so I thought he’d be better off without me, but now all I’ve done is condemn us both to this goddamn slow death, and it’s all my fault and there’s nothing I can do about it now.”

“How long have you got?” Rita asks.

“About a year,” Juno says. He can’t meet her eyes.

“Okay. So…” Rita sinks back down into the couch cushion beside him, “What are you gonna do?”

“I…” Juno looks across the room to where the comms Jacket gave him are on the bedside table, “I got a job position. With… a bunch of criminals.”

He half expects Rita to jump out of her seat in excitement, to tell him he’s just like this one character from some stream she saw ten years ago. But she just reaches out and takes his hand.

“I don’t want you to leave me,” Rita says. “Not if you ain’t got long. I know it’s selfish, but I just can’t stand thinkin’ about being in Hyperion without you.”

“I know,” Juno says softly. “I… can’t live without you either, Rita. That’s why I was going to ask if… maybe you wanted to come along? If things go well, maybe it’ll set you up with a job after I…”

Rita leans forward until her forehead is against Juno’s. “Of course, Mista Steel,” she says, “If this is what you gotta do with what you got left… of course I’ll go with you.” 

Juno smiles sadly, and shifts to kiss her cheek. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier,” he mumbles. “I know I should’ve given you more than a year to prepare—“

“Don’t be silly, a year’s a whole lotta time!” Rita pats his arm, “And anyways, boss, I’m sure something will happen by then. The galaxy ain’t done with Juno Steel just yet. Everything’s gonna be fine!”

“Sure,” Juno says, because he doesn’t want to break her heart. If this is how she deals with the news, then… he’s not gonna stop her. “Sure, Rita.”

“Well then, can we keep going with this movie night already? Sheesh!” Rita flops back into the couch cushion again. She doesn’t let go of Juno’s hand, though. Juno lets himself melt down into the couch so that he’s leaning into Rita’s side.

“I don’t tell you enough,” he says quietly. “I love you, Rita.”

She says nothing for long enough that he thinks she hasn’t heard, and he goes to shift to look up at her. One of her arms comes down around his shoulders and she stills him, and buries her head into his hair. He thinks maybe she’s not letting him move because she doesn’t want him to notice that she’s started crying. Rita’s always been that way.

“You don’t gotta tell me,” she says into his hair, “I know, boss. Just like I know you know I love you too.”

“Yeah,” Juno says, and sniffles. “Yeah.”

A few days later, he meets Rita outside the boarded up office of Juno Steel, P.I., with a duffel bag of his own stuff. She has a suitcase the size of herself, because of course she does, and it’s not long before Jacket appears in a cloud of dust to take them away. 

“I’m Rita!”

“And I am Jet.”

“And  _ I’m  _ Rita!”

“And I am Jet.” 

“What.”

Then they’re off, with Hyperion City shrinking back behind them, and thoughts and scenes from the last thirty-eight years playing out in Juno’s head. He watches the reflection of the city in Rita’s soap-bubble glasses lenses, and thinks long and hard about what it is he’s signing her up for, what she’s agreed to so recklessly just because it means she’ll be able to spend some more time with him. 

He doesn’t put his visor down. The descending spaceship kicks up a ball of dust right into his eye and lungs that has him heaving his guts out onto the Martian sand.

“Goddamnit, are you an idiot?” he hears Vespa before he sees her, in a flash of green hair as she hauls him to his feet, “You want to make your lungs worse, asshole?” 

“Leave him be, love,” Buddy Aurinko appears over Vespa’s shoulder, giving him what he assumes is a wink, mostly from the theatrical manner she delivers it. “He’s all yours to poke and prod at later.”

Juno stumbles back from Vespa’s arms and looks around at their motley crew, Buddy and Vespa, Rita staring at the both of them with stars in her eyes, Jet already wheeling his hover cycle up the ramp of the spaceship lying in the dust before them.

“This is everyone?” Juno asks, trying and failing to hide his voice cracking from the dust in his throat. “Seems kinda… small for a crime ring.”

“There’s one more,” Buddy says, “He’s something, alright. Seems quite interested in meeting you, but for all his talk of it we couldn’t convince him to come out and say hello. Something about getting sand in unsavoury places. Follow us in, darling, whenever you’re quite recovered, and we’ll get you acquainted before your medical exam.”

Vespa cracks her knuckles, looking at him with what is honestly the most terrifying grin he’s ever seen on someone who’s been about to give him a medical exam, and that’s saying something considering he once woke up from surgery looking into the ugly mug of a guy he outed as cheating on his spouse.

“You alright, Mista Steel?” Rita puts an arm on his side.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m—“

“Okay good because Mista Sikuliaq said he’d show me around and I really  _ really really  _ wanna see the new spaceship so badly so as long as you’re good I’m just gonna go ahead okay? Bye!”

“—fine, thanks,” Juno mutters to the Rita-shaped dust cloud she leaves behind.

He dusts himself down as best he can and then trudges up the gangplank. Buddy flicks a button as he walks in and it starts to raise. 

“So this other guy,” Juno says, “Crime legend as well? Another name I’m gonna remember from the news streams back when I was in the Academy?”

“I very much doubt you will have ever heard of his name at all,” Buddy says, “I have a startling suspicion his is fake. I only took him on the job because he had a track record simply so interesting, I just  _ had  _ to meet him. And assign him a technically impossible heist as a job interview.”

“Impossible, huh?” Juno mutters, “Feel like that word doesn’t mean much to your types.”

“You seem to have a very sour view of criminal professionals,” Buddy looks at him with her playing-a-game look. “I have a feeling you have some wonderful stories to tell.”

“Yeah, ever heard of the Utgard express job?” he asks, and Buddy raises both her eyebrows.

“Well, what do you know,” she says, something like suspicion in her voice, “Our man cited that very same job.”

“What?” Juno barks, just as they step over the threshold into the main room of the ship. He goes to wheel on Buddy when he catches movement out of the corner of his eye and stops still in his tracks, unable to goddamn breathe.

Peter Nureyev, all six gorgeous goddamn feet of him, slides off a barstool and walks over to Juno and Buddy. Walks, carrying his perfectly healthy body. He looks Juno up and down, and smiles with all his perfectly healthy foxes’ teeth.

“Hello,” he says, and not a muscle on his face betrays any recognition. He takes Juno’s hand and raises it to his lips, kissing the back of his scarred hand, “Juno Steel, yes? I must say, Buddy hadn’t quite warned me you’d be beautiful.”

“Uh,” Juno says, dumbfounded, as Peter lets go of his hand.

“Masahiko Euanthe,” he says.

This is wrong. This is all so wrong it makes Juno feel sick right through to his stomach, and he opens his mouth not exactly sure what’s about to come out of it when his lungs answer that question for him.

Nureyev steps back, startled, when Juno starts to cough. Juno folds at the knees and ends up leaning on the ship floor, with one hand keeping him upright while he keeps coughing, and coughing, and coughing. Eventually he heaves forward and spits a package of rose petals onto the ground, and then Buddy is hauling him to his feet.

“Alright,” she says, “I think we’d better get you checked out sooner rather than later, darling. We can put a hold on the flirting for now.”

She leads Juno out of the door towards the medbay, and the last thing he sees through his streaming eyes as he gets shoved through the doorframe is a half-second glimpse of Peter Nureyev’s face, looking stricken with something unidentifiable. 


	2. rose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just what WAS Peter Nureyev up to all that time?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU FOR ALL THE KIND FEEDBACK you guys mean the world to me and I WILL be responding to all your comments.
> 
> another chonky one, but they get a little shorter after this !
> 
> CWs for this chapter: mild sexual references

“I have the target in my sights. I’m advancing on—” is what Peter is saying when he starts to cough. 

It shakes him to the core, too loud in the silence of the room he’s meant to be hiding in. It’s a wet, unhealthy sound, and even after a few coughs his throat starts to feel raw. Somewhere in the distance of the dark room, an alarm goes off.

“ _ What  _ are you  _ doing _ , Wang?” hisses the voice in the covert comms in his ear.

Nureyev sinks back behind a large filing cabinet, slumping to the floor. He tries to hold back the fit enough to manage, “I—some kind of—”

“Is it some kind of gas?”

Peter puts a hand to his mouth and feels something — God help him — thick and slimy come out of the back of his throat and into his palm on the next cough.

The coughing stops. His body is shaking. There’s sweat on his brow. He doesn’t want to take his hand away and look. If it’s blood, or worse, some lump of flesh, a tracking chip he hadn’t known was in him, he doesn’t know what he’ll do.

“Jun Wang? Are you still there?”

“I’m… here,” Peter pulls his hand away to speak, and looks in his palm.

Dahlia petals. He can hear his heartbeat in his ears.

“Let’s…” he struggles to his feet, eyes glued to the soft orange petals in his hand, “Let’s… re-evaluate the situation.”

* * *

He gets out of that job alright, but he isn’t paid for his work. His distraction caused them an extra half an hour’s delay, and in the crime world, that’s as good as a lifetime. 

Nureyev smiles politely at the meeting and nods his head and walks out of there as fast as he can the second he’s let go, coughing into a handkerchief. He manages to make it back to his hotel room, waving off the hopeful advances of the staff (word spreads fast, he’d only slept with one of the bar staff a night ago) as they rush to pander to his every need. 

It’s not likely that they’re fawning over him because of rave reviews. His performance had been abysmal, and he’s not sure whether or not either he  _ or _ his partner were satisfied in the end. They want a piece anyway, because he had the stupid idea to pose as the long lost cousin of the heir to the throne. 

In his defence, a good royalty ruse usually does wonders for his self-esteem. A few days spent making eyes at the hotel staff and being provided top quality room service for every meal is as good as therapy.

The thing that ruins it, every time, is that it seems no matter what mask he slides over his face, the heart is the same in all of them. And Peter Nureyev’s heart is still very much broken. 

It’s pathetic. He even caught himself telling a starry eyed man at the bar last night, a few champagne glasses in, the tale of his alias’s heart being shattered by a distant, cold woman who’d chosen his estate over him, even after everything they’d been through together.

Every meal tastes half as good as it would if Juno were with him. Every glamorous bed feels empty and too large. Every night spent in someone else’s room feels… hollow. Not even charming people’s clothes off of them makes him feel good anymore— he keeps waiting for one of them to suddenly fix their dark eyes on him and read him to the quick, to see right into his core. He goes into every encounter with a handsome man with his breath bated, waiting for them to suddenly wheel on him and tell him  _ you’re under arrest… _

But none of them do, because none of them are Juno Steel. 

He thinks back on all of these fleeting fantasies, as he leans over the sink in the ensuite of his room, and decides that really it makes sense that this is where his treacherous heart has led him. Decides it makes sense that Juno Steel would have the last laugh, from half a galaxy away.

He tries to parse how it is he feels about it, but his heart remains as unreadable to himself as a Venusian clock. A broken Venusian clock. 

So instead, he washes out the taste of dahlias in his mouth and stares at himself in the pale pink light of the mirror.

“You are on fire!” the mirror cheers at him in a pre-recorded voice. Nureyev stares impassively at it. He would love to meet the person who decided to make mirrors robotic. He’s needed an excuse to try out some new knife techniques.

Well, then. His knowledge of flower spitting disease is limited at best, but he understands the general gist. It starts with petals, develops into buds, and by the time you’re hacking up fully fledged flowers you’re as good as gone.

He walks out to a full length mirror near a large, plush bed, and stares at himself in it. He looks fantastic, his pseudo-snakeskin suit perfectly tailored to his body. His hair has gotten a little longer, but the way it falls around his face compliments his eyes, which are surrounded in neon green eyeliner sharp enough to cut.

He doesn’t look like a dying man, at least. 

He sits down on the end of his bed and pulls out his comms. The first thing he searches, once he’s secured a private, untraceable server to search on, and successfully found the right corner of the dark internet, is  _ how to mask hanahaki disease. _

He gets results from a lot of snake oil salesmen all claiming that just a little bit of  _ this  _ thirty-thousand cred powder combined with a long list of demands will instantly disappear away the symptoms.

_ No crime lord wants to hire a conman who let himself fall subject to broken heart disease,  _ one listing starts, and Nureyev has to put the comms down and pace the room several times.

Well, that is the reality. He holds his hands evenly by his sides and slows his breathing. If he doesn’t find some sort of way to get his disease managed, his career is as good as done. And not just because the news of a thief with hanahaki disease would make him so singly identifiable among criminal circles that his one asset would be stripped entirely from him. Hanahaki disease carries with it a sort of stigma in some circles. Rumours spread that only the weakest-hearted fall prone to it, or that one’s thoughts will be endlessly consumed by your forbidden lover day and night if you suffer from it. People ask questions, they want to know — did you let yourself get cheated on? Did you get them killed with your stupidity? Are their memories worth too much to you to get the surgery?

Surgery! Of course — Nureyev had entirely forgotten that surgery for early stage hanahaki disease is entirely possible. He rushes over to the end of the bed again and sits down. He’d have to find a black market surgeon in the Outer Rim, preferably one who knows how to keep medical records strictly silent. That would mean a high cost, but it wouldn’t be the first surgery — not even the first on his chest — that he’s had to fork out more than he should’ve for.

Every time the issue of losing his memories of one Juno Steel rises to the forefront of his mind, he buries it again, and keeps moving forward.

It proves impossible to find anywhere that will even give him so much as a quote or estimate within the criteria he supplies: it has to be a high-end surgery from a reputable source; it must leave him with minimal scarring; it must be able to occur entirely anonymously. And so he’s back to square one.

Until he clicks on a website and it lights up with a proclamation:  _ the information possessed by this unlawful website has been reclaimed by Dark Matters for the greater good. _

Nureyev stares at those two words for a very long time. As a principle, Dark Matters deals with the fringes of civilisation: with rumour, and hoax, and hokey urban legend. 

With a disease so peculiar and unique it is considered fiction by a portion of society.

Anything he has done by Dark Matters will come at a cost far more than financial, he knows. But there are things he can trade. He got into Dark Matters once -- if they don’t instantly want to kill him for that, he could provide them with intel. Clearly he has proven he is clever enough to infiltrate almost any secure organisation, after all. If they were to supply him with surgery, he could be one of the most powerful agents they’d ever had. They wouldn’t even be his worst employers. 

Getting into contact with Dark Matters is not easy, but Nureyev knows some basics of hacking. He can’t get into their servers, but he decrypts an email address. He spends an hour writing something that toes the line between a request and an anonymous threat, and sends it away.

There’s a response within half an hour. 

His message has been sent on to someone named Agent G, who says that Dark Matters can provide him with surgery as long as he agrees to infiltrate whatever job they send him, no questions asked, to provide them with intel. He has to agree to regular progress checks. Agent G also notes that if he says no to their offer, or goes AWOL at any time, Dark Matters will have no choice but to trace back his message and have him eliminated.

The quote for the surgery itself has eight zeroes and an interest rate that almost immediately kills  _ his  _ interest in pursuing the avenue any further. But he is desperate, and running out of time. The longer he is out of the game, the faster his money is running out, and at least if he is restored to full health, perhaps without the burden of Juno Steel weighing on his subconscious, he will be able to start working against putting some of that debt away. 

Besides, regardless of which option he chooses, it seems even the act of sending the email has consigned him to a life of Dark Matters surveillance. The file that Juno Steel occupies in his brain is full to bursting, and it surfaces again with a vengeance. For a moment he feels blinded with anger that the stupid choice Juno made has left him in this position.

Nureyev grabs his comms and accepts the offer.

The month leading up to the surgery is hard. He is unable to work, and hence must spend most of his time in hideaways, living with his condition. 

Every time he coughs, it renders his entire body useless. The petals taste disgusting, and they are different colours every time. Orange, white, yellow, a deep purple, blue. Every time he sees them he thinks about how they had reminded him of Juno — their beauty, uniqueness. The variety and multiplicity of them. Their depth and the layered arrangement of their petals.

His own thoughts sicken him these days. How he’d ever let himself get… like that about somebody is an oversight he can’t ever excuse. A fatal flaw in his judgement he must always be careful he never repeats.

He considers writing down everything he knows about Juno Steel, placing it in a book, and leaving it for himself to see after his surgery. He almost gets all of the way into convincing himself it would be beneficial — a sort of guide for him to be able to know which types to avoid, if he wants never to be distracted in that way again. 

Then he realises he can’t lie to himself; his sentimental heart still wants to make a fool out of him, after all this time, and so he very intentionally does not write down anything except for a word by word recount of the night Juno Steel left him. 

The night before his surgery, he burns it.

The waiting room for the Dark Matters surgeon’s office is more mirror than wall, and lights bounce off every square inch. Somewhere in the middle of the glare — Nureyev takes off his glasses and cleans them against his shirt — an attendant with serrated teeth grins wide at him. Nureyev thinks the look suits better on him.

Nobody asks him for his name. Nobody asks him a thing at all — they just silently lead him through a winding corridor of tunnels to a back room, and then bow, and leave him in silence. 

The door opens, and he is ushered through. 

When he wakes up, forty-eight hours later, his heart feels kilograms lighter.

At first, he remembers absolutely nothing at all about the cause of his hanahaki — there is a year-shaped space in his memories that, while somewhat unnerving, is far more comfortable than having to remember whatever it is he’d embarrassed himself by doing all that time ago. 

As the weeks move forward, the blank space starts to form itself into shapes. To think of it as a room in his mind, it is as though someone has covered all the furniture with a sheet — with time, he can discern shapes of what must lie underneath; with exploration he can even feel the intricate details in some areas, but the contents of the room itself are unknowable to him. 

All in all, it’s a pleasant experience.

Dark Matters’ first assignment for him comes in an email a few weeks later. He has been poking around the channels of communication for intergalactic crime looking for odds-and-ends jobs, but none have taken his interest. When he sees the name in the listing attached to the Dark Matters email, an emotion so powerful courses through him he has to lie back on the bed.

_ Heist listing. Technically impossible. High chance of death. 1 position to be filled. Inquire: B. Aurinko.  _

_ B.  _ _ Aurinko.  _ As in  _ Buddy _ Aurinko. As in: the fanciest and most successful thief in the last century of Solar and Outer Rim history combined. As in the thief he’s modelled a great deal of his own heists and an even greater deal of his own fashion choices after since the age of fourteen. He’d seen the rumour that she’d resurfaced floating around the internet, but the last he’d heard those conspiracy theories said she’d resigned herself to guarding some silly lighthouse in the Cerberus province. For years he’s presumed her dead; even at his most hopeful he’d have put money on her being permanently retired.

One position to be filled. The listing is only a few minutes old -- Dark Matters are quick -- but Nureyev knows he won’t be the only cut-throat, starry-eyed thief to want to jump at the opportunity, regardless of how high the stakes are. 

But no. Buddy Aurinko, if it really is her, is smarter than that. She won’t be looking for any amateur thief to throw themselves at her feet like a pathetic fan. He has to play this  _ smart.  _ Think  _ smart,  _ Peter.

So Nureyev sets his comms up on his desk in the room, paces, makes himself a cup of tea, fills it with sugars, paces again, and then sits down. He cracks his knuckles, and starts doing something he hasn’t done in years: he writes a resume. 

He deliberates for a long moment over what to put in that could set him apart from all of the other thieves crawling over themselves to snag the position. His accomplishments are extensive, but virtually impossible to prove if push comes to shove. He lists everything from the age of twenty up until the Utgard express heist, which he can only barely make out through the block in his memory, and then sets about making the decision of what he can use as his leverage.

There is one thing that he knows for a  _ fact  _ no other thief can lay claim to. Something that will almost certainly secure him the position. The only issue is whether or not he wants to risk the chance of giving her up.

He fights with himself for a long moment before he sighs, and sets his fingers to the keyboard again.

_ Current owner of the Ruby 7. _

He wakes up the next morning and checks his emails. He has breakfast, and almost wears his thumb out with the speed at which he is pulling down the screen, begging it to refresh and load faster. He goes downstairs and uses the heated lap pool in the hotel, and is so busy checking his emails every five minutes that he doesn’t even pay any attention to the handsome man staring at him the entire time he has his shirt off like his chest is magnetic. He spends the next week like this — in a delirious sort of fever, checking his emails enough times that his comms locks him out.

“Damnit,” he swears, putting the knife he had been practising with between his teeth so that he can use both his hands to tap away at the  _ prove you are not a robot  _ test. Half an hour later, after the security questions, the sudoku puzzle, the IQ test, and the ‘select every image with a juvenile specimen of Nyctereutes procyonoides’ challenge, he unlocks his emails and promptly drops his comms. 

_ B. Aurinko RE: the family. _

He reads the email so fast it occurs to him that not a word has sunken in and he has to read it again. She wants to meet him.  _ Buddy Aurinko  _ wants to meet him. And she wants to see the Ruby. If he can prove he possesses the car, she will assign him a task to ensure his claims to crime excellency aren’t entirely fabricated. If he completes that, the job is his.

There is more: she wants him to agree that should his position on the ship be agreed upon, he will relinquish the Ruby 7 to the crew, and it will remain in her possession after the job is over. 

He had had a sinking feeling this would happen. The Ruby is currently being stored at a top security facility. He had to pay thousands of creds a month for its safekeeping by an old, powerful friend, and thousands more for the other old, powerful friend he’d paid to watch the first like a hawk for when he inevitably would try to take it for himself. Neither of these are exactly clever financial decisions for a man living payout to payout, especially not one who has found himself in an exorbitant amount of debt, but… well, it’s the  _ Ruby Seven.  _ He can’t be expected to just give her up like some common car. She’s  _ special  _ to him.

But there’s something else that’s special to him, admittedly, and it’s the idea of working alongside those legends of crime that Buddy Aurinko would pick to be her companions. Really, if he’s honest with himself, he’d do anything to get on her crew.

That, and Dark Matters will likely kill him if he  _ doesn’t  _ get the position -- but that is a matter for another time. Whether or not Dark Matters sent him the listing, he would likely have gone for the job anyway.

And, he thinks to himself, as the feeling of elation just starts to creep in at his being considered at all, he can always just steal the Ruby back at the end of their mission, after he’s given Dark Matters all the intel they need. 

With that matter settled, his excitement finally breaks through. Usually he is much better at curbing his enthusiasm, but given the circumstances, he allows himself a few minutes of feeling absolutely elated. Then he allows himself a few more for good measure. He rings up the bar and treats himself to a bottle of high-end champagne. Then he treats himself to the man who brings it up for him.

The next day, he sets up his comms, gets to work, and doesn’t stop until he’s infiltrated every visible corner of underground criminal communications and searched the entire database for Buddy Aurinko’s name, trying to get any semblance of a hint as to who his new crew members may be, and what their goals are. He finds a few credible links to prove her interest in a little number called the Emily Topaz — a jewel kept by the executive of a banking firm on La Paz. 

He looks at the calendar. There is a week until his interview.

* * *

A week later, Peter Nureyev parks the Ruby 7 in the carpark of the  _ extremely  _ classy Wiradjuri hotel. He smooths his hair and eyebrows in the small mirror.

“How do I look?” he asks, to which the car wolf whistles and rumbles.

“Ruby, you wicked girl, you flatter me,” he pats her steering wheel fondly. “I’ll be back soon.” 

He crosses from the VIP carpark into the lobby of the hotel, his heels clicking with every step against the polished marble floor. Without glancing at the staff he walks straight into the hotel bar, and there he has to stop for a moment to take in the atmosphere. It’s a dark place, with low jazzy music curling up from the floor and mahogany wood rails leading down the ramp into its belly. At the bottom of that ramp, he finds the bar itself — it stretches out away from him in a horseshoe shape before it disappears into a curtain, behind which is the kitchen, if the faint sound of plates is to be believed. To the right there is a stage, where a young woman sings in a baritone voice and a sheer gown. Peter himself is wearing a fancy little number, a dress that he hopes straddles the line between irresistibly alluring and flawlessly classy just as Buddy Aurinko herself is famed to do. 

To the left of the room there are a handful of scattered tables with white tablecloths, and at the very back there are booths surrounded by dark curtain. Two of them are open, and a third in the corner is shut. They are appointment only, but nobody batters an eyelid as he saunters over and peels the corner of the curtain aside, “Mz. Aurinko?”

“Mr. Euanthe,” a voice says from the darkness, and then she leans into the low light and he sees  _ her _ . “Do sit down, darling.”

Buddy Aurinko. In the flesh. Her bright red hair is shocking against the dark purple of the booth, and it falls over one half of her smooth brown face. She gestures for him to sit down. If he were any weaker, he might start trembling with the mix of anticipation and excitement that surges through him. As it is, he feels a suppressed tremor trickle down his spine, and he packs it away and slides into the booth across from her.

“I trust you arrived safely,” she says, and then she pauses. “Oh dear. I do wish I had sent you a photo of what I had been planning to wear.”

For a second, Nureyev feels a jolt of panic that he has crossed some invisible line. Then he realises, like the crack of a whip, that he and Buddy are in  _ the exact same dress.  _

A laugh is shocked out of him. Inwardly, he crows — as superficially embarrassing as it might be to be seen in the same fashion, he beams at the knowledge that he is able to emulate Buddy Aurinko’s sense of style so flawlessly. 

“Shall we get right to business?” she asks him, and he nods.

“I’m afraid I shan’t be telling you any details about the job I am organising,” Buddy splays her hands out on the table as though showing him invisible schematics. “The score I am after, Mr. Euanthe, is no novice’s game, and I cannot trust the intricacies to just anybody. Certainly not until the little matter of the car you proclaim to possess is settled.”

“Of course,” Nureyev says. “She’s parked just outside. Shall we go say hello to her together?”

Buddy raises a single eyebrow. “You talk like she’s a friend to you. Just how long have you had this car, Mr. Euanthe?”

“Around a year,” Nureyev says cautiously, unsure how to interpret the look Buddy is giving him. “I stole it as part of my heist on the Utgard express. Brock Engstrom had been keeping her locked away in his garage like some worthless machinery. With conditions like that, Mz. Aurinko, I had no choice but to liberate her.”

“I see,” Buddy twitches her lips into a smile, “And you’re perfectly fine with giving her up, then?”

“I am,” Nureyev says without a moment’s hesitation. “However beautiful the Ruby 7 may be, the chance to work on this job is one I can’t pass up. Surely you understand how many others would kill to work with you.”

“I put an advertisement out that said I was looking into a possibly non-existent item with a high probability of  _ death _ , darling.”

“And how many applications did you receive?”

She smiles properly now, “Enough to fill my inbox twice over.”

“As I thought.” 

“Alright,” Buddy says. “Show me the car, Mr. Euanthe, and then we can discuss the little matter of the job I want you to do for me.”

He leads her out of the hotel bar, and then out of the hotel into the carpark, where the Ruby is still sitting, waiting. When she sees them coming, she flashes her lights and makes a chirping sound. 

“My, my,” Buddy stops in her tracks, and puts one hand on her hip. “You weren’t lying.”

“Of course not,” Nureyev says, a little insulted. He pats his hand along the bonnet of the car, and she purrs at him. “She’s my very best friend. Aren’t you, girl?”

She whistles, and he looks back at Buddy to see that she’s raised an eyebrow at him.

“I can think of a member of our crew who might have somewhat of an issue with you staking that claim,” she says, and Nureyev feels his heart knock in his chest.

“You don’t mean Jet Sikuliaq,” he says, and Buddy doesn’t answer him. She walks around to the other side of the car, and it pops its door open for her. She sits inside and closes the door.

Nureyev follows, opening the driver’s seat and sitting down. 

“Well,” she says, “You’ve proven yourself to be quite the candidate, Mr. Euanthe. If you can settle the matter of the little task I have to set you, then I will accept your job application outright.”

“And what might that be?” Nureyev asks, already feeling his fingers twitching towards the car’s glove compartment.

“I have my eye on a shiny little number named Emily’s Topaz,” Buddy Aurinko says, and Nureyev feels his heartbeat in his ears. He lets her get a little of the way into explaining the facility the topaz is kept in and how it is understood to be impenetrable by even the very best of what intergalactic crime has to offer.

“If I may interrupt,” Nureyev blurts out, unable to hold it in any longer.

Buddy stares at him for a moment. Then she leans back in the car seat and shrugs both of her shoulders, “Go ahead.”

And Nureyev reaches forward and taps twice on the glove compartment. It pops open, and Emily’s Topaz topples out onto the console of the car between them. 

There is a long moment of shocked silence. Buddy stares at the gem, and then looks up at him. “This is real?” she asks.

“I’m very happy to wait however long you need for it to be verified,” he says. 

She makes a noise in the back of her throat and looks at him again, and this time the look in her eyes is entirely different. It makes Nureyev swallow thickly — for a moment, it seems to be something very close to suspicion. Rather than decide he is worth respecting, it seems she may have just decided he is dangerous.

“Well,” she says at last. “I don’t know how it is that you found that this was the trinket that I wanted. I suppose that makes this job interview very short indeed.”

“I suppose it does.”

Buddy reaches out and takes the topaz in her hands. She holds it up to the dim light, and then tucks it somewhere into her gown. 

“I will be in contact,” she says, and like that, she opens the car door of the Ruby 7, and is gone.

Nureyev sinks down in the seat of the car and wipes the sweat off of his forehead. Then he grins in the empty, quiet space, and collapses onto the steering wheel. 

Two weeks later, he gets an email from Buddy Aurinko. It says that she has verified the gem, and that she is ‘impressed to the point of intimidation’ with his skill. It then goes on to detail the amount he will be paid, and where he can expect to meet for their journey to begin. 

Nureyev is so elated that for a moment, he forgets his debts. Then they come crashing back down on him when he gets an email from Dark Matters demanding a status report. He sends them a copy of the email from Buddy, and tries not to think about what exactly it is that Dark Matters want with her crew.

Buddy emails him a file on each of his new crew members several days in advance of their rendezvous, which Nureyev is glad for — he sees the name Vespa Ilkay and quite literally falls off the end of his bed. The last he heard of Vespa Ilkay —  _ the!  _ Vespa Ilkay — she had fallen to her death on Balder. The underground crime world hadn’t recovered from the loss for years. Then he gets over his shock just momentarily enough for his eyes to catch the name Jet Sikuliaq, and he shouts, “ _ What?! _ ” at the top of his voice, so loud that the occupant of the neighbouring room knocks sharply on the wall. 

He is sharing a ship with three legends of crime. His own idols, each one of them thought ghosts lost to time and progress, in the flesh, working alongside him. It’s so much to consider that Nureyev gets dizzy. He is acutely aware that when he arrives he will be a different kind of ghost: nobody will have ever heard of him. 

Or will they? It’s entirely possible that Vespa, at least, would know of the Angel of Brahma. She’s Outer Rim, if the memory he’s retained from the days he trawled her CrimeWiki page obsessively is still correct. The idea that she might know of his actions — respect them even — and yet never know that he is standing there right beside her almost burns him up from the inside out. 

The other two names on the list — Juno Steel and Rita (just Rita? Strange) — at least, are unfamiliar. That does something to calm his nerves, and especially so when he reads their files. Both are new to crime. One is some former investigator with a proficiency in sharpshooting, and the other a hacker who not even Dark Matters has been able to apprehend. Impressive, he’s sure, but not quite on the same pedestal he places Buddy, Vespa, and Jet. It makes him feel a little better knowing he won’t be the  _ least  _ important person on the ship.

Having an investigator onboard  _ is _ an issue, however — especially if he turns out to be sickeningly loyal and not the kind to turn a blind eye to a little innocent theft between coworkers — but that’s likely nothing a few well-placed words and winks can't quickly fix.

He reads Buddy, Vespa, and Jet’s files obsessively over the next few days. He falls asleep imagining best-case scenarios for their first impression — and wakes up in a cold sweat having dreamt of the worst-case ones. Then the day is upon him, and he packs up all his things and heads out towards the spaceport where their ship, the Carte Blanche, is waiting for him. 

“Mr. Euanthe,” Buddy Aurinko says, a teasing smile on her face, when she sees him, “How nice of you to join us at last.”

Nureyev is so quick to check his watch that he drops one of his cases, “I hadn’t realised I was running late—”

“You’re not! I was simply being earnest, darling. It’s lovely that you’re here,” the smile on Buddy’s face broadens a little before she sends him a wink and spins away. 

Nureyev leans down to pick up his case and stands up again to find himself chest-to-face with Vespa Ilkay, in cargo pants, a black crop top, acid-green hair, and a sharp glare trained on his face — which she has to tip her head back to properly glare at.

Nureyev swallows, and readjusts his bags urgently to hold out his hand, “Masahiko Euanthe,” he says.

“I know who you are,” she says to him, and then turns away without another word. “Sikuliaq!” she shouts, “Help our new recruit Hiko with his bags, would you? If I watch him flounder any longer I’m gonna start to take pity on him or something.”

“It’s Masa—” Nureyev’s voice dies in his throat, finding himself suddenly engulfed in the shadow of the broad figure of Jet Sikuliaq. He doesn’t look that much happier to see him than Vespa did, eyeing his face with a perfectly neutral expression. 

“It is nice to meet you, Hiko,” he says, takes one of Nureyev’s bags, and walks ahead of him onto the ship without a single other word. 

Nureyev stands in stunned stillness in the middle of the spaceport for a second longer, and then rushes to catch up to them all, his face burning with embarrassment. Hopefully he can pass his total awkwardness off on sleep deprivation from space travel, but  _ still _ .  _ Calm yourself down, Peter! _

Buddy shows him to his quarters and allows him time to unpack. Nureyev spends most of it on his bed with his hands over his eyes, trying to fight for  _ some  _ form of composure. Then Buddy knocks on the door and collects him again, dragging him out to their main living room area.

“We are stopping by Mars, darlings, to collect the last two of our family members,” she seems to be making up for everybody else’s lack of enthusiasm. “I expect you all to come out to the front to give them their proper welcome.”

Despite that, Nureyev opts to stay back while the rest of them go out to greet their new members. He sees the way she glances at him when he suggests it, but there’s not much he can do about that except make a mental note to himself to be careful not to let his guard down around her. She is quicker than she looks, Buddy Aurinko, and she looks as quick as the tail of a comet — all the way down to the taste of awe she leaves on your tongue even once she has blinked out of your vision. 

While the three of them leave him unattended, he slips off of his stool and starts to poke around the living room area. There are plenty of drawers on the main table, in the centre of which is a holographic projection device. He roots through his pockets with one hand and slips out a small USB, which he plugs into the device. It begins to download all the schematics that have been projected by the device in the last week.

Unfortunately, it only gets halfway through before he hears the sound of voices and footsteps clunking down the hallway. He hears a shrill voice demand something of Jet, who responds in perfect monotone, and then the sets of footsteps start to ease away down another hallway in the ship. 

There’s silence for a long moment, then a flurry of movement, and Vespa rushes past him towards the medbay, muttering something in a frustrated tone under her breath. For a brief second, Nureyev wonders if something… happened, out there.

Then there is the final set of footsteps, and the sound of Buddy Aurinko’s voice. In contrast to that he can hear the low grumble of a rough, uneven voice in response to hers, the words inaudible. It sets off something in the bottom of Nureyev’s stomach that he very quickly files away, and then the two of them turn the corner.

Juno Steel — and Nureyev assumes it is Juno Steel, from the hardness of his expression. He has that sort of investigator charm to him; Nureyev doubts this is the profile of a hacker. He walks into the room and something crosses his face like he’s just been slapped.

He stares, his eye wide on Nureyev’s face, and Nureyev allows himself a silent moment of congratulating himself. The man is quite clearly enamoured with him, and that works perfectly. It always is so much easier when people are attracted to you; they trust you more, are more willing to forgive you your suspicious behaviour — can even be made into an accomplice if enough time is spent on them.

So Nureyev slides off the stool and walks over to Juno Steel’s side. He reaches out and takes his hand, and brings it to his mouth. His skin is scarred and bumpy underneath his lips, but warm too, and Nureyev kisses it gently. “Hello. Juno Steel, yes? I must say, Buddy hadn’t quite warned me you’d be beautiful.”

“Uh,” Juno stutters, and Peter lets go of his hand.

“Masahiko Euanthe,” he introduces himself.

The lady in front of him stares at him for another long few moments, his face frozen in a strange sort of expression. He looks almost regretful, and Nureyev quickly glances over his hands for engagement rings.

Juno Steel opens his mouth to say something to Nureyev and instead all of a sudden he starts coughing. Nureyev takes a step back, a little shocked about what to do. He looks to Buddy, trying to understand if this is… a normal response from his new crew member, when Juno sinks to the floor and coughs until little red flecks fall into his hand.

For an alarmed moment, Nureyev thinks he is bleeding. For a puzzled moment, he wonders what the use of a man with a lung condition this severe is aboard their mission.

Then Juno spits out a handful of petals, and Buddy hauls him to his feet.

“Alright,” Buddy says efficiently, “I think we’d better get you checked out sooner rather than later, darling. We can put a hold on the flirting for now.”

And just like that, she ushers Juno out of the door towards the medbay, and Peter Nureyev finds himself alone again, staring at the flower petals on the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 👀 👀 👀 👀 👀


	3. snapdragon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I've decided to name these chapter titles after flowers for symbolism reasons. Flower language has INTENSELY varied interpretations but I'm taking them from here https://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/archives/parsons/publications/flowers/flowers.html if you want any extra trivia about the chapters haha.
> 
> CWs: none applicable for this chapter aside from the general CWs for the whole fic.

Juno gets led to the medbay in a daze. He can feel his heart pounding in his ears, and he doesn’t think it’s just because of the lack of oxygen that tends to come with coughing up roses. 

Buddy drops him into the arms of Vespa, who forces him down into a gurney, gets him to take his shirt off, and presses a stethoscope between the cups of his bra. 

“When’d you develop it?” Vespa asks him, and Juno comes back to himself, still a little disoriented. 

“About a year ago—hey, did, uh…” how does he frame this and make it sound nonchalant? “Did… Euanthe say anything about having some sort of…”

“Hiko?” Vespa narrows her eyes, “What? Do you know something about him? I thought he was shifty from the second I laid eyes on him," now she seems to be half musing to herself, "He’s trouble. Dangerous. You don’t just  _ get _ the Ruby 7 without being in debt to someone, probably someone we don’t want to be running into. Is that right,  _ Steel _ ? You know something about that, huh?”

Suddenly she's very much directing her suspicion back on him. “Uh—” Juno quickly changes tacts. He’d sound weird if he started prying into the medical details of the crew, especially if they have no idea they know each other. “No, nothing—I just—it was nothing.”

She narrows her eyes at him, but she doesn’t respond, and puts the stethoscope back into her ears. 

Juno definitely can’t ask. Nobody’s mentioned anything about Nureyev having had hanahaki, and while it’s not  _ impossible  _ that they just haven’t thought it was relevant, or haven’t wanted to bring it up…

There’s a sinking feeling in Juno’s chest. It feels like just another kick in the gut from the universe. Of course Nureyev got the surgery and moved on. Why wouldn’t he? It’s not like they knew each other for more than a few weeks. Plus, he’s a master thief, he sort of relies on the whole stealth thing. Invisibility. Hard to be invisible if you’re wracked with constant coughing fits. It’s just sort of… painful to think that Juno meant that little to him.

Hell, what's wrong with him? Nobody is worth dying for. He’s learned that lesson by now, even if it took him a few attempts to get there. He should be proud of Nureyev for making what must have been a hard choice. He should’ve made that choice, too. They should both be on this ship smiling at each other with new eyes— and that’s a weird, unsettling thought. That they could have met all over again from the start.

Would Juno still have been just as enamoured with him? Would Peter still have fallen for him, without the combination of everything they went through last year? He’s still never figured out the answer to the question of whether what they had was something special, or just a product of their surroundings.

And that’s a third option, Juno guesses. Maybe Nureyev never loved him at all, and he’s only playing at not being able to recognise him. Maybe there’s something going on for him and it’s important nobody knows that Juno knows who he is. Would that be better? 

“Steel!”

Juno flinches, like he does when anybody raises their voice at him, and Vespa, standing beside the edge of the gurney, narrows her eyes at him again. “I said I’m taking an x-ray, alright? Put your arms down by your side. Chin back. Don’t move.” 

“Okay,” Juno mumbles, and follows her instructions. 

She lifts up a big tablet and holds it over Juno’s chest. He hears it make a bunch of weird little sounds, and then a polite little chime, and she takes it away again and grunts. 

“What’s the news, doc?” Juno asks, and hazards a look. 

Vespa puts the tablet down on the bench in the medbay and presses a button. Just like that, a hologram of what Juno can assume is his chest pops up in full 3D. 

It doesn’t look… ideal. Juno’s never been a genius with medicine — cheated through all his biology exams in school and has avoided doctors like the plague ever since, apart from when it was absolutely necessary — but he’s pretty sure lungs aren’t meant to look like. Well. 

Meant to look like they have vines creeping up their sides.

“See here?” Vespa points to a patch of white down towards the bottom of his lungs, “This is where the petals are growing. Along here…” she gestures to the vines, “Is where they’ll branch out and start building whole flowers. By the time that happens, you’ve got a few weeks.”

“Oh, cool,” Juno says weakly. “How far away is that, exactly?”

Vespa shrugs, “Depends on a lot of factors. I can give you what medication we have, but hanahaki meds aren’t cheap, and they sure as hell aren’t that efficient. Best luck is that you get to hold out until we get our hands on the Curemother prime.”

“The what?” Juno asks, and Vespa smirks at him. 

“The Curemother prime,” she says. “We’re gonna steal it.”

Juno props himself up on his elbows on the gurney, “The what.”

* * *

“The Curemother prime,” Buddy says, a good deal later when Juno’s shirt is back on and there’s a new bottle of pills sitting in his pocket, and their new crew is all gathered around the kitchen table, “Is the legend that I was referring to. A panacea of microscopic bacteria, said to be able to cure all manner of illnesses in individuals. It’s a key goal of ours for more than one reason, which I will get to in just a moment. First, let me explain exactly how the items we mean to steal work their way into our little heist.”

Juno tries not to be distracted. He really wants to hear every word that Buddy has to say to him. It’s one of the conditions of him working on this crew, after all — that he gets to know exactly what they’re planning to do far before they do it. 

But he finds his gaze drifting to Nureyev more often than he’d like. He’s still processing this entire situation, how it is that they ended up together all over again, whether Nureyev actually knows who he is or not.

It didn’t help when, before, Buddy had gone to the trouble of pointing out that Juno had a proven history of working well together with everyone  _ except  _ Vespa, or Masahiko Euanthe. Juno had wanted to shout, to say  _ hey, actually, we went through hell together, the two of us _ . Rita had started to pipe up— “Hey wait Mista Steel, ain’t—” and Juno had very quickly talked over her. 

Rita keeps giving him weird looks, too, which isn’t great. They haven’t had time to talk about this new situation that the two of them find themselves in, trapped aboard a spaceship with the man that gave Juno the disease that is eating away at his lungs. He’s trying not to think about it as much as possible.

Nureyev meets Juno’s eye and winks at him. Juno feels sick to his stomach, and tunes back into the conversation.

“At that point, we will be able to use the blade to form the bridge that will allow us to cross over and take the Curemother prime from where those greedy corporate bastards have been keeping it away from the rest of humanity. The first two doses will go to my darling Vespa, to cure her radiation sickness, and then to you, Juno.”

“Huh?” Juno asks, “Wait, what?”

Buddy gives him a pained look, “Do try to listen, darling, especially when you were the one who demanded I explain myself here before we get started on any of our incredibly important work. I said we will use the second dose of the Curemother prime on you, and cure you of your hanahaki.” 

Juno blinks. “Cure me?”

“That is what I said, isn’t it? Hopefully the Curemother can clean up whatever it is stuffing your ears shut, too.”

“Okay, look, excuse me, but I just went from being pretty sure I’ll die in less than a year to hearing that your plan is to find some sort of … magical cure?”

“It’s hardly magic, darling. And it relies on a great deal many things to work in our favour. It existing, in the first place, for example. And the assumption that nothing happens to delay us and we can get there in time to save you. I’m afraid I can’t guarantee either of those things, Juno. I don’t wish to falsely advertise.”

She actually looks a little sympathetic, which is uncomfortable, so Juno clears his throat and aims to change the subject as soon as possible.

“Right,” he says. 

“That is, except if someone really handsome who also happened to be the person that Mista Steel is dying because of happened to want to proclaim his love for Juno any time in the next few months,” Rita says loudly, and everybody looks at her.

Juno coughs loudly — fake, this time — “Yeah,  _ Rita _ , well that’s not going to happen. First of all, we don’t even know where the guy is—“

Rita’s face erupts into a big frown and her mouth opens, ready to fire out some words that would likely be disastrous to hear, and so he talks over her very quickly “—and besides, can we please not talk about this now?  _ Please _ .”

Rita’s mouth closes. She narrows her eyes at him, but she backs down. “Fine,” she says.

“I understand you’re very upset, darling,” Buddy directs at Rita, “It’s not nice to consider that a dear friend is in the sort of condition we find our Juno in. But that’s all the better reason to work together to find our legendary score before anything terrible has to happen. And that brings us to our first heist.”

The first heist, as it turns out, is basically the worst idea ever. Juno and Nureyev partnered together, going in alone as  _ husband and wife,  _ to infiltrate the ball of an eccentric trillionaire. What’s not to love? All Juno has to do is make it through hours in a high stakes situation without coughing, all while pretending to be the arm candy of the man who gave him his disease in the first place. Ideal.

But even that is a secondary problem to the one that presents itself to him directly after the meeting: namely, Rita. He forces her down the hallway and into his room as quickly as possible before she opens her mouth — once that happens, there’ll be no stopping her.

“Mista Steel you gotta be kidding me!” she shouts, just as he gets her over the threshold into his room, “You ain’t just gonna do  _ nothing,  _ right? I mean— that’s  _ him _ , right? His hair’s’a little different and we can see his eyes on accounta him not wearing that big Dark Matters mask now and he don’t answer to Agent Rex Glass anymore but— that’s  _ him _ !”

“Yeah, Rita, it’s him,” Juno grumbles, “And I can’t do anything about it, okay?”

“What!?” Rita jumps right up onto the thin bunk Juno supposes he’ll call home from now on, “You can’t just stand there and do nothin’! You gotta tell him how you feel! Then when he says it back—”

“That’s not happening, Rita,” Juno cuts her off, “It can’t. Did he look at all like he knew who I was? Did he give  _ even a hint  _ that he recognised me? At all?”

Rita stops bouncing on her heels and looks at Juno. She’s basically equal heights with him like this, and it’s sort of terrible to look at. She frowns. “No, Boss. He didn’t seem to know ya at all…”

“He had the surgery, Rita,” Juno says. “He cured himself of hanahaki by erasing his memories of me. That’s how it works.”

“So you mean…” Rita sinks down to sit on the end of the bed.

“He doesn’t feel anything for me anymore. Probably never will again, okay? Especially not with only a few months to get to know me, while I’m half dying. I’m not exactly a top candidate for falling in love with. Not in the state I am.”

“But—well—you only knew him a few months, didn’t ya?” Rita asks. As she does, she starts to inflate back to her full excited state again, “And hey! Surely you just gotta explain it to him! Oh Mista Glass-Euanthe, I know you don’t remember me but I’m your long lost  _ true love _ —”

“I’m not—”

“Sure you are! You don’t just  _ get  _ hanahaki without being someone’s true love, Mista Steel! That ain’t how it works! You just gotta march down there and tell him who you are, and then sweep him up in a big kiss, and then all his memories will come back and he’ll say  _ oh Juno, I always knew you’d find me again,  _ and  _ THEN  _ comes the part in the movie I gotta cover Frannie’s eyes for when we watch streams together — if you know what I’m sayin’ — and then you get to live happily every after  _ hooray _ !” Rita falls back onto the bed with her arms spread, sliding them along the blankets like she’s making a sand angel and kicking her legs out, while making some sort of terrible noise Juno assumes is meant to be like… a crowd cheering? Maybe? 

Juno sighs. He sits down on the bed beside her, and then lies back so their shoulders are touching.

“I know you want to believe it’s that simple,” Juno says, to the roof so he doesn’t have to say it to her. “But it’s not, Rita. You can’t just make people fall in love with you in a few words. It doesn’t happen.”

“It happens in  _ all  _ the best—”

“And they’re  _ streams,  _ Rita. They’re meant to package up an idea of fantasy life and sell it to you. Their whole schtick is about making things that don’t happen in real life seem just a little bit more possible.” Juno pauses to think of an example, “Like the existence of good cop, in Bad Cop 3.”

And then they devolve into their usual arguments — over which stream actors did better jobs in what instalments of the Bad Cop series, and who deserved that Space Oscar and who definitely did  _ not _ , no matter what very handsome host Carl Lee, who both Rita and Juno had admitted to crushing on, said.

It gets quiet again in their room for a moment, and then Juno leans over the side of the bed and hacks up a single petal. He sighs, and flops back onto the bed, keeping the soft rose fragment curled up in one of his hands.

“Mista Steel, ain’t you gonna get rid of that?” Rita asks, sounding horrified, “That’s disgusting.”

“I’m sick, Rita,” Juno says, “I get a free pass on being disgusting.”

“Well that simply ain’t true. My Ma had Plutonian Swamp Fever for a whole eight months — and you  _ know  _ how that fever gets, Mista Steel, all pussin’ and bleeding…”

“Eugh. What is wrong with you, Rita?”

“And she managed to keep our house clean the entire time! She always used to say to me, Mista Steel, that it’s important to keep a place tidy no matter what. Why’d you think our office stayed as clean as it was for so many years even despite all the garbage you always left around?”

“Hey.”

“It’s just the truth, Mista Steel, I dunno what you want me to say.” 

Juno sighs, “Just… please don’t say anything stupid to Euanthe, okay? I can’t handle that sort of stress. Worst case scenario is he doesn’t know how to handle it and makes everything worse. Even the best case scenario is that he tries to make himself feel something, can’t, and then feels guilty about it. The result’s the same either way, alright?”

“I won’t say anything, Boss,” Rita says earnestly. “We just gotta focus on getting you that Curebrother Sublime.”

“The… Curemother prime?”

“I know what I said!”

“I—right,” Juno sighs. “Yeah. We just gotta get that, I guess.”

“And that starts with your super special  _ heist tonight _ !” Rita exclaims, clapping her hands together. “Have you seen the dress that Captain A got picked out for you? It’s  _ so  _ cute!”

“The  _ what _ ?!”

* * *

He really has to stop saying ‘the what’ at times that make for perfect jump cuts. Ten minutes later, he’s standing in front of the one mirror in the shitty bathroom on board while not-Peter-Nureyev paints his lips and lines his eyes.

“Try not to blink, Detective Steel,” he says, and holds the corner of Juno’s eye with his thumb so he has better access. It makes Juno close it instead, and that’s honestly better. This is emphatically the worst thing that has ever happened to him, and so, so many terrible things have happened to Juno Steel. 

Why did Nureyev have to insist to be the one to do his makeup? He’s sure he could’ve managed on his own just fine. Okay. Maybe not  _ just fine _ , but well enough. He’s never exactly been an artist at it, but just because he hasn’t done his full face in a while doesn’t mean he’s forgotten, he’s pretty sure.

Nureyev insisted it was about making their aesthetics match for the job. Whatever. Juno gets the sense that he’s just trying to leap for things to impress Buddy. It’s not obvious, of course, but Juno knows the signs. He sees the way he hides his hands behind his back whenever he talks to Buddy, Vespa, or Jet — trying to hide them shaking. 

He wonders how Nureyev is doing. Is he as alright as he lets on? So far, he’s been the picture of calm and collected, and not once given Juno a hint that things  _ aren’t  _ okay for him. But he wants to sit him down, force him to drink some tea and just… just…

To be honest, Juno just really wants to hear him say his name the way he used to. He hadn’t ever  _ fully  _ got Nureyev’s thing about his name, but now it sort of makes sense — the intimacy he craves comes mostly in the form of Nureyev simply handing his name to him as reverently as he used to, the inflection on the syllables in his soft Outer Rim accent that Juno could fall asleep listening to every night if he would let him. 

Juno starts coughing, and Nureyev steps back to let him hack out a petal. When Juno looks back up, Nureyev is giving a look over his shoulder towards Buddy. Juno knows what it’s saying a second before Nureyev’s words follow his face. 

“Buddy, are you sure this mission might not perhaps be suited to someone a little more… capable of blending in?” 

“I believe I warned you, Mr. Euanthe, that a key part of this crew would be navigating the strengths and weaknesses of each of its members. I have reason to believe that Juno and yourself are perfectly suited to this job, and I would have you trust my judgement, if it’s not too much.”

Nureyev looks briefly chastised before his face smooths back over into a perfect stillness, “Of course,” he says, “I was only looking out for the detective’s safety.”

“Of course,” Buddy says, in a voice that says she doesn’t at all believe him.

And Juno doesn’t either. Nureyev doesn’t give a shit about him — not this Nureyev. He’s angling to get on a mission with one of the others, basically gagging for it, and Juno is just an unfortunate coworker who can’t help but get in the way.

Juno swallows, and reminds himself that  _ it’s fine.  _ Nureyev made the right choice. Juno can’t blame him for how he acts because of it.

“Now. Do  _ try _ and hold still,” Nureyev redirects to Juno, and starts up on his makeup again. 

It finally gets done — and thank God. Buddy and Rita had insisted on being in the room so that they might evaluate Juno’s looks the second Nureyev released him, and Jet had come to watch simply, Juno suspects, because Buddy and Rita had. The point is, their one tiny shitty bathroom is full to bursting with people, and there’s sweat down the back of Juno’s neck, and the dress fabric is starting to stick to his front.

They all spill out into the hallway, where the temperature is at least a few degrees cooler. Juno manages to stumble out from the mess of people, his gown almost wide enough that it touches either side of the hallway as he finds his balance.

“Mista  _ Steel _ !” Rita squeals, and Juno looks at her, brushing the wrinkles out the front of his dress as he does so. 

“What?” he asks, and then stops. “Why are you all… looking at me?”

Rita looks like she just might burst into sparkles, or throw up rainbows, or something equally terrifying. Buddy is giving him an up and down, an incredibly satisfied sort of look on her face like everything is going exactly according to plan — and Juno only has a second to register how badly that feeling settles within him when he catches the way Nureyev is staring at him.

The second they meet eyes, Nureyev grins. “ _ Well _ ,” he says, and steps forward to take Juno’s hand. He lifts it above his head, and it takes Juno longer than it really should for him to get the idea and stumble around in the narrow hallway in a shaky approximation of a twirl. 

“You’re beautiful, Madame Dauphin,” Nureyev says, and winks down at him. 

“Uh,” Juno says eloquently. “Not… half as much as my husband is.”

Nureyev smiles. For a moment, his affection feels almost real. Then Nureyev turns to Buddy, and the facade is immediately stopped. “Perfect,” he says, dropping Juno’s hand and stepping away from him. “Our covers are exactly in order. I have the plan memorised from top to bottom. This will be a heist as simple as plucking jewellery from a socialite baby.” 

“I’m glad to hear it, darling,” Buddy says. “Now! Who let all of you lazybones hang around in the hallway like you don’t have any jobs to do? Get to it, crewmates! Our first step in our journey starts tonight.” 

Juno’s job until they leave for the heist, apparently, is to sit very still and try not to smudge any of his makeup. He reads over the files that Buddy prepared for them while he waits for everything else to be put into order. When they get the signal from Rita that she's hacked the fake creds they’ll be using to buy the stuff from the auction, the plan rolls into motion. 

* * *

“This is rather pleasant,” Nureyev says as they stand outside of the red carpet, their voices easily drowned in the hubbub of passing crowd so that they may talk to each other openly. “Have you ever been to Jupiter before, Detective Steel?”

“Technically, nobody’s been to Jupiter,” Juno deadpans. He’s bored. This dress kind of itches, and his heels are murder on his feet, and he’s regretting having to get all dolled up when they clearly could have posed as waitstaff. 

“Well, to one of Jupiter’s satellites, then,” Nureyev counters. “Of course, they’re all rather different, but I find myself fascinated with them.”

“Right. Well I’ve never been off Mars before this.”

“Mm, I have to say that does track. You do have a sort of Martian… sense about you.”

“Oh no, that’s just the depression,” Juno says flatly. 

“Ah.”

“Where are you from, Euanthe?” Juno asks, and Nureyev looks a little relieved for the subject change.

“Venus,” he says, without a second’s hesitation.

“Huh. Weird, ‘cause I thought your accent sounded pretty Outer Rim. Would’ve placed you somewhere near… I dunno. Shiva?”

Nureyev’s face doesn’t change at all, except for the slightest twitch at the corner of his mouth before it erupts into a polite smile, “Would you believe I hear that a lot? My parents are Outer Rim. Shiva, as you so astutely noticed. You know, when I first read your file I thought you’d be rather disappointing. I’m  _ so _ pleased to discover I was wrong.”

He walks ahead of Juno down the red carpet. Juno blinks in silence for a moment, trying to decide whether or not that was an insult, and whether or not he deserves to complain about it. Then he decides what the hell. “Hey!” he shouts, and chases him down the red carpet. “Euanthe!”

It was a stupid decision to poke him, in retrospect. Juno can’t quite say what it is that made him want to do it. He knows just dropping that little fact probably set Nureyev off to be tense and upset for the rest of the night.

Was that the point? To drop enough of a hint just to make him feel unsettled? Does it make Juno feel better by proving Nureyev he's smarter than he looks, even if he's only using information Nureyev himself told him?

Juno grits his teeth has he catches back up with Nureyev—Euanthe. Masahiko Euanthe-- and puts his brain back on track. He can't let this... situation... change how he behaves towards him. Not if he wants a chance at getting to know him again. 

And besides, he has to focus. There's a heist to complete, after all. 


	4. yellow tulip

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's an important CW in this chapter! 
> 
> Because this chapter is a partial recount of the Man in Glass heist, there is a short period of time in which Nova is referred to with incorrect pronouns. I tried to minimise it as much as possible but some lines are directly from the script.
> 
> It's not really misgendering on behalf of Juno or Peter in canon, because at that point in time they didn't know her pronouns, but it IS misgendering to us because WE know and it does suck to read.
> 
> If you think this will really squick you, I've marked the bit the wrong pronouns are used in with a bold X so you can skip it.
> 
> Otherwise, enjoy the (!! MAXIMUM HAM !!) of this chapter. Another chapter will be out tomorrow.

Juno Steel is more perceptive than Nureyev’s first impression of him was, and that’s dangerous. 

He can still feel his words prickling on his skin about his Outer Rim accent. A lot of Outer Rim accents are similar, and he thought with time and practise he’d whittled his down to be virtually non-existent, or at least unidentifiable, as long as he’s focusing hard enough on it to pack it away. For Juno to be as perceptive to pick it out as Brahma’s sister planet… unnerves him.

Because maybe it’s not perception. There’s something sharp about the way Juno looks at him. It makes some inner part of him twist, and not in a fun way — although he’s not so above himself not to admit that Juno is handsome. It’s like he already knows Nureyev’s deepest secrets and is just… waiting to see how long Nureyev will keep up the ruse of pretending he doesn’t. 

It’s deeply unsettling, but it is not relevant to this job. If Juno proves to be an issue, he will simply find a way to dispose of him. He has always had his ways out of tight corners; Peter Nureyev has spent almost forty years without being held captive for long for a reason.

He files the concern away and focuses back on the job in time for Buddy to call.

If all of Juno’s skill points are spent in perception, it might explain why some of his other skills are… lacking. Firstly, the blatant disregard for Buddy’s authority he displays over their phone call makes Nureyev’s teeth clench. He has made a habit out of being as personable as he can in any given situation, and this Juno Steel talks to Buddy Aurinko like the word ‘respect’ has never meant a word to him. Then, not only does Juno flash their fake creds to the guard at the door — a move that has Nureyev pressing his nails into his fist to stop himself from shouting something to stop him — when the two of them enter the red carpet, Juno attempts a twirl in Nureyev’s arms... and trips.

Nureyev catches him, but only just, and they get frozen, with Juno’s big brown eye blinking up at him.

“Uh…” he smiles toothily, “Pretty smooth, right?”

It’s the first time he’s seen Juno smile since he arrived on this ship, and it takes him aback for a moment. Something about it is gentle, and spreads right down Nureyev’s chest into his heart. It feels like he can look right into Juno’s soul — right into every thought that flickers across his pretty face. The smile dips away and Nureyev feels like a flower, cast in shade by a cloud that has moved across the sun he needs to feel alive.

Ah. How interesting. 

He packages the feeling away and clears his throat. “Perhaps not your finest moment, my dear,” he says as he leans back to help Juno regain his balance.

“Right. Uh, yeah. So… okay,” Juno says, and seems a little flustered himself — the first time on a big job will do that to someone, and Juno has already proved his skills do not lie in subtlety. 

“You see this thing we’re here to steal yet?” he asks, and Nureyev blanches. 

Case in point. 

“In due time dear! In due time,” Nureyev says loudly. Then he lowers his voice and raises an eyebrow, “I would… suggest you don’t throw those sorts of words around, love.” He takes a cursory glance of the crowd. It’s about what he would expect to see — a lot of terrible rich people laughing and mingling amongst themselves while no doubt hundreds of the people their wealth-gaining has exploited squirm and beg on the streets of hundreds of planets across the galaxy. 

**X**

“We will not be the first thieves to steal from Zolotov,” Nureyev informs him, and Juno rolls his eye.

“You don’t say.”

“You—you’re familiar?”

“It was all in the briefing, Euanthe,” Juno frowns, “What, didn’t you listen to a word Buddy said? And besides, I’ve been to enough rich people parties to know the general gist. Lots of illicit substances, plenty of licit ones too. Security’s probably so intense at this thing 'cause Zolotov is spooked or something — nobody’s seen him since he got smash-and-grabbed a year ago.”

“Precisely,” Nureyev says, awkwardly. What he’d picked up on Zolotov he’d found through his own research, and it’s a little embarrassing to be caught out having wasted time doing so because he’d zoned out during Buddy’s briefing. He’d been so focused at the time on getting out of the meeting to go do the research that he hadn’t considered that perhaps… well. 

His mistake. He will endeavour to make sure it doesn’t happen again. And for now, he must try not to embarrass himself in front of his co-worker. 

“Uniformed guards at every corner… Zolotov isn’t hiding his anxiety, that’s for sure. Looks like he’s showing it off,” Juno glances at his watch. “Okay. So where do we start? Auction begins in… one hour.”

“The diameter of your gown may make stealth less of an option for you,” Nureyev points out. “I’m better suited to case the room. I will seek out the map we’re after and confirm our points of exit.”

“Right. What am I supposed to do?”

“Mingle with the guests. See if there are any with any communications devices or weapons. If you’d like, you can see if you can find our distinguished host. Zolotov shouldn’t be too hard to find — just look for the terrible haircut.”

Juno snorts, “Yeah, what even is that thing? It looks like a lion and a wet cockatiel had a really ugly baby.”

The corner of Nureyev’s mouth quirks before he can really help himself. “Quite,” he says. “Ta-ta, Madame Dauphin.”

“Hang on, what am I supposed to do when I find Zolotov?”

Nureyev pauses. “See if you can bribe him into giving us early access into the auction. Or find a way to signal me and I will make my way over. Does that sound agreeable?”

**X**

“Okay, sure,” Juno says, and Nureyev slips off into the crowd. 

It is a far more natural feeling, being amongst people like this, be it as it may that Nureyev despises each and every one of them. There is nothing quite like being a face in the crowd — a droplet in the stream of hundreds of bodies. He moves among them as simply as that — a droplet, pulled to wherever the tide may take him next. He lets his fingers into pockets as he moves, stealing everything from ID cards to jewellery as he weaves from one end of the ballroom to the other.

There is invisibility in a crowd like this, and Nureyev had underestimated exactly how much he would miss that sense of invisibility once he joined the Carte Blanche. It is already getting tiring having so many people so single-mindedly devoted to  _ understanding him.  _ Buddy Aurinko is hard enough, with her wise words and knowing looks. He can tell she is just begging to crack the puzzle of Nureyev’s psyche, and he wishes that she wouldn’t try too hard — he does not doubt that she might find some way to do so. If anyone could, it would be her.

Vespa Ilkay already hates him. That much was true almost from minute one, but only became more apparent the more they talked. When it was revealed that he had requested the use of a pseudonym, he saw her eyes snap to him, filled with distrust. It is not necessarily incorrectly placed — he himself understands well the importance of knowing exactly what it is every single one of your crew members is capable of, and a great deal of that knowledge comes from knowing their past. Their name. 

Rita seems to be strangely interested in Nureyev in a way he can’t quite understand. He’s very used to people being attracted to him, and this is… not that. No, it’s more something akin to the way Juno looks at him — like they both know something about him he doesn’t, and they’re waiting for him to pull off his own mask and reveal it. 

He tries not to think about it. Maybe it’s a Martian thing, or a detective and hacker thing, or a… Juno and Rita thing… or something like that, even though as far as he knows not a single other person has ever looked at him that way.

Jet is also distrustful of Nureyev, likely in the same way that Vespa is. He’s not sure whether he prefers the distrust that they show towards him, or the curiosity Buddy shows towards him. He doesn’t like being looked at like a puzzle she can’t wait to pull to pieces, but he may take that over living on a ship where he is constantly made to feel unwelcome.

Well, whatever happens will happen. Once again, he has gotten off track. He had been thinking about how nice this crowd is, how invisible he feels in it, how all his problems— Juno Steel’s eyes and Buddy’s curiosity and Vespa’s hostility and Dark Matters—

He packs that train of thought away before it can continue.

In the crowd, he confirms that the security guards’ firearms are props. Then he finds the target. It is shining in the light of the room near the stairs to the stage, perched like a decorated egg. He can feel his fingers twitch. It would be so simple — to pluck it and disappear. The Aurinko Crime Family would never be able to find him again. 

But even an object as prized as the globe will likely not sell for more than a few hundred million creds, and that… isn’t large enough a payment to Dark Matters that they might forgive his having left the crew.

He glances around at the crowd to find his bearings, and that’s when he sees— Juno. 

He is standing near the bar, a drink in one hand and the other on his hip. He’s talking to a long-haired, long-nailed woman who is laughing at him like he’s the funniest man she’s ever seen in her entire life. 

There’s a unique look on his face too — he looks cocky, and confident, and self-assured, like he knows she likes what she sees in him. The look suits his face. It makes him look… radiant. 

“Now my dear Miss Dauphin, I do not think I have  _ ever  _ laughed so vigorously at one of these stuffy parties in my  _ life! _ ” she is utterly enraptured with Juno, that’s to be sure.

“That’s Madame to you, lady,” Juno says right back, and the woman seems to light up from the inside out, basically jumping out of her skin.

“‘Lady!’ With a sneer! Nobody has  _ ever  _ talked to me that way! Madame, you are a cad, and a card, and if you keep this going you might just be my new best friend!”

_ What _ is Juno’s angle here? 

Nureyev watches them in the silence for a moment longer, frozen between acting and leaving the two of them alone. Has Juno really stopped in the middle of the heist to pick up some pretty face in the crowd? He may not know Juno well, but it hadn’t seemed his sort of thing to stoop as low as this… surely Buddy wouldn’t have hired a lady this prone to distraction.

Nureyev clears his throat. “Dear?” he calls. “My love?”

“Oh hey, and here he is now!”

The woman looks over at Nureyev and Nureyev sees her immediately give him the kind of look that he is far more used to getting from strangers. She rakes her gaze up and down him and bites at her finger, “The mysterious  _ Monsieur!  _ Well, now! It sure seems like gowns are not all you have good taste in. How much would you like for that sharp-faced man in the window? I’ve been thinking of picking one up just like him.”

“Toss me half of what I paid and we’ll call it even.”

“Oh, you are a  _ wicked  _ woman, Madame!” she bursts into laughter, and Juno grins at her, clearly pleased with himself. 

“Come on over here, toots, I have someone I want you to meet!”

“Toots!” the woman screeches, “You will say  _ anything _ , won’t you, Dauphin?”

There must be something more than Juno having picked up a pretty face in the crowd going on. And so Nureyev walks over. 

The woman immediately reaches for Nureyev’s hand and brings it to her lips, “Nova Zolotovna, pudding. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She winks at him.

Nureyev sends a glance Juno’s way, and Juno sends him back an even, smug look. He’s honestly impressed by Juno’s detecting work — this woman looks nothing like the person they were sent here to apprehend: her haircut is entirely different. Even Nureyev probably never would have picked this up on his own.

“Miss Zolotovna!” Nureyev exclaims in delight, “It is an absolute honour to meet you! And here I was wondering where our stunning host had disappeared to. May I say you are looking absolutely radiant this evening. It’s enough to make a man get cold feet.”

“Don’t let them get too cold, honey cakes,” Juno teases, and Nureyev has to file away the abysmal pet name before he physically reacts to it.

Nova doesn’t seem to care much about Juno anymore. She goes bright red and giggles, the hand not in Nureyev’s going straight to cover her mouth, “Monsieur! What an absolute darlin’ you are, honey. Dunno if you overheard the conversation I was having with your charmin’ wife, but I’ve been looking for a man just like you, you know. Have you ever considered eloping?” 

“Hey, uh— excuse me?”

The gears in Nureyev’s head start to turn. If they play their cards right here, it could shave half the time off of the heist entirely. In fact, it could entirely bypass their need for fake creds and to sit in a terribly boring auction. He laughs, “You are just as delightful as they say, Miss Zolotovna! My wife and I have been meaning to attend one of your auctions and meet you for ages.”

“Aw, honey, ain’t that just the sweetest thing? Well you are officially now my guest of honour. Anything I can get you, you just let little old me know!”

“Well,” Nureyev glances across at Juno, “I have always been curious to see the collection of artefacts that you so generously are offering up for auction tonight. I understand if you can’t, of course—”

“You wanna come see them? Oh, that ain’t no problem at all, dumpling. You just come on over with me. Leave your wife here, why don’t you?”

“Uh—Hey, I’d love to see them too,” Juno says loudly.

“I am afraid I prefer to have my wife with me wherever I go,” Nureyev adds, and Nova bites at her lip and looks him up and down again.

“Oh, alright. But only because you’re so cute,” she agrees at last. 

Nureyev takes Juno’s hand so that he can better lead them through the crowd towards Nova’s collection of fancy keepsakes. She walks quickly, with almost as much grace as he does — a lifetime of navigating crowds of rich idiots will instil that skill in you. 

Where Nova leads them is a little place right near the stairs up to the stage, just off the side to the dance floor, where Nureyev had caught a glimpse of the globe before. As they walk there, Nureyev gives careful attention to double check the locations of all the exits, and out of the corner of his eye he can see Juno doing the same.

Up close, the collection of items Nova has for the auction itself is so impressive even Nureyev has to stop and appreciate them. There are tables upon tables stretching out along the length of the dance floor. Even a cursory glance reveals to Nureyev three or four artefacts that could probably go for hundreds of millions of creds on the market. It is a thief’s paradise — especially a thief who has found himself in as much debt as he has.

Juno lets out a long whistle, obviously having similar thoughts. “This thing is goddamn impressive, Miss Zolotovna,” he says. “What are some of these from, the original colonisation?”

“Oooh! I’m just so glad you asked, Madame! You’re exactly right. Some of these artefacts predate space travel! Can you believe it? It’s why I’ve gotta be so uptight with security, sugar, cause people have died before to get their hands on ‘em.”

“You’re not kidding,” Juno mutters and Nureyev avoids his eyes when Juno tries to glance at him. He decides not to deal with an ex-private eye’s thoughts on what does and doesn’t deserve to be stolen.

“Anyways, these little things ain’t nowhere as impressive as the two of you darlings. You simply must tell me where the two of you originate from? I can’t remember if I’ve heard the name Dauphin before."

Juno opens his mouth to answer, and Nureyev jumps in.

“Darling! Wouldn’t you have a look at this? It’s that artefact that I have been telling you about!” 

He picks up the Gilded Globe of Reaches Far. It shines in his hands, the jewels reflecting the multi coloured lights of the dance floor. It is heavy, and beautiful, and  _ expensive _ …

“My wife and I have been interested in this little artefact ever since we first heard of it,” Nureyev explains to Nova, who is watching them with a look of confusion on her face.

“That little thing? Honey, outta this room of incredible things, that’s hardly even anything compared to what I have. If you really wanna be impressed—“

“No, no. This is the artefact I’ve always wanted to see. My love can vouch for that, can’t you?”

“Uh— yeah. You talk about it nonstop, Dauphin. You’ve always said you’d do absolutely anything to be able to own it.”

Nova lights up like a laser flash. “Absolutely  _ anything? _ ” she asks, and steps close to Nureyev. Her fingers start to trace up his arm and she pumps her eyebrows at him. “Have you ever considered yourself the marrying type, Monsieur?”

“I have a wife,” Nureyev says plainly back to her.

“Yeah, uh. Hi,” Juno says.

“Well, past mistakes aside,” Nova brushes over him quickly, “Like I said before, sugar, I’ve been looking for someone who might be willing to set themselves up in holy matrimony with me. And baby, you’re just my type. I can give you more than  _ she _ can. I’ll give you anything you want if you do it. Including…. that globe.”

Nureyev looks over her shoulder towards Juno, who makes a series of confused ‘you’re the master here!’ gestures back to him. 

The thing is that Nova’s proposition is incredibly tempting. He could accept right here, and that could be the end of his debt to Dark Matters. He could pay them out as compensation for having left the crew, and let them assign him to a different job. Or he could bribe his way off the grid again.

There’s nothing stopping him from doing it, either. So the rest of the crew finish their journey towards the Curemother prime alone — that’s not the worst thing that could possibly happen to any of them, and Nureyev really needs that money. More than he needs to believe in some legend of an item that he could have a hand in stealing. More than he needs the approval of the crew that has already shown so much disinterest in him. He could even let Juno and the rest of the crew take the globe, and continue to live a life of opulence, selling off the rest of the riches Zolotovna owns — at the small cost of living at the side of a woman he doesn’t love.

Nureyev swallows, “I’ll do it,” he says.

“Hey— what the hell?” Juno shouts.

“Only, we may have to move quickly, my love,” he says to Nova, and then looks over her shoulder, trying to signal to Juno as he pointedly says, “My wife is the jealous type. I fear she may shoot at me if we are not fast enough!”

A second later, Juno’s hidden blaster is in his hands. The shot he fires goes wide — too wide for him even with his injury — but Nureyev’s assessment of Nova is that she is more for theatrics than strict reality, and it doesn’t take him much to fake the pain of having been hit. 

“Oh! Oh, Nova, my love, I’ve been struck!” he wails and clutches at his shoulder. He flings himself down on the ground dramatically, throwing the Gilded Globe so that it rolls out of his hands and across the tiled floor.

Nova soaks up the drama like a billion-cred sponge.

“Oh my God! Security! Security! You have to get here right now, the love of my life is bleeding out on the floor right in front of me!” she shouts, despite the obvious lack of any blood. Out of the corner of his eye, Nureyev sees Juno run to his side and scoop up the globe.

“See you later, Dauphin,” Juno whispers, and makes for the door. 

It strikes Nureyev as a uniquely peculiar moment. It takes a lot of trust in him, to run off and leave him lying like this. Trust in his capabilities to get out of this alone. Trust that he won’t just take the opportunity to run away with Nova. Lying on the floor, Nureyev feels a strange warmth unfurl in the bottom of his stomach. Juno barely knows him, and yet — unlike the others — he’s willing to put that trust in him. 

It feels… nice. And suddenly Nureyev knows he doesn’t want to prove that trust to have been misplaced.

Nureyev lets the security swarm him on the floor over the hysterical sounds of Nova shouting for somebody to call an ambulance. He can only hope that Juno makes it — he cant see him from here.

“Miss Zolotovna,” one of the guards finally says, “He’s not bleeding at all.”

“ _ What?!”  _ Nova shouts, and then finally starts to check Nureyev all over for injuries. When she finds none, she collapses into Nureyev’s chest, sobbing her heart out.

“Oh Mr. Dauphin! I thought I had lost you! And on the night before our wedding and everything!” she wails.

“I— haven’t been shot? But I was so sure!” Nureyev sits up and grasps at his own chest when Nova leans back to give him room to do so. “It must have been a miracle of some sort.”

“Yes, yes, my honey pie, it was a sign from the universe simply telling us we had to be together!”

“But my wife— she took the globe!”

“Oh, damn the globe! It’s not even close to the most precious thing I own, sugar, especially not compared to you. You just let me know if you’re alright.” 

“I am alright, my love,” Nureyev says, “But if you can excuse me for a moment, I simply have to get to the bathroom. This has been a traumatic experience. I think I might need some time to recover from it. And I can’t have any security with me,” Nureyev adds, with a voice on the verge of tears. “It will only make me… more stressed.”

Nova’s face is full of sympathy, “Oh, of course, my sugarplum. You go ahead and do whatever it is you need to do. I’ll set up the auction and then we can get through it and then we can get to planning our  _ honeymoon _ , sugar.”

Nureyev decides he really does not want to stick around for the honeymoon. He makes it outside of the venue hall towards the bathrooms, where he picks up his comms and hears the barrage of yelling coming down it from the other side.

“Mista Euanthe that was the greatest thing I ever saw in my entire life!” screeches Rita down his ear, loud enough that he hast to take the commspiece out. 

“Jet and Juno are waiting outside in the car, darling,” Buddy’s voice chimes in. “Don’t hesitate — we don’t know how long Ms. Zolotovna will fall for your little ruse.” 

In the debriefing mission after the successful extraction of the Gilded Globe, Nureyev’s gut is in a twist. 

He made a stupid decision today — deciding to let some childish ideal about trust overtake his very real need for money, fast. He is yet to live out the repercussions of his actions tonight, but it may have been the difference between getting out of his situation with easy money, and being trapped on this crew gathering intel for longer. The truth is that Dark Matters’ interest rates are increasing faster than he had expected, and it seems that the exact terms of his indenture change with every conversation he has with those in charge of it. That may have been his last chance to put himself in a position where he could get out of his debts with money rather than information. 

Not only that -- he’d chosen to give up his chance at money and consign himself to paying his debts with information for what? To prove he was trustworthy? What does that mean when the information Dark Matters wants from him ultimately leads to the Aurinkos’ capture? He has only delayed his inevitable betrayal, and made worse the disappointment that the others will feel towards him eventually.

Stupid. Stupid! It is the sort of thing that got himself afflicted with hanahaki all that time ago -- the foolish tendency of his heart to overtake his brain. All for the sake of being trusted by one Juno Steel.

Nureyev glances over at the man in question, currently recounting their mission to the Captain. 

“…honestly, I can’t tell what’s worse, you know? The people who built those goddamn Debtor’s Tags they use in the Cerberus Province… or people like her, who just have money and throw it wherever they have to in order to make more of it.” 

There is a sharpness to Juno’s jaw as he talks, and a fire burning in his eye. The look he has on is similar to the one he had fixed Nova with back while they had followed her to where her priceless artefacts had been kept.

She morally outrages him. It’s a look that sits well on his face, until—

Juno starts coughing, his impassioned speech devolving into spluttering. The small warm feeling that had flickered into life at the bottom of Peter’s stomach is snuffed out entirely. He had forgotten that Juno’s heart is already beholden to somebody else. Forcefully enough that it is killing him.

He can’t remember what that’s like, but some part of him aches. Whatever happened to Juno to leave him like this, whoever broke his heart… Nureyev would certainly like to meet them. It seems too cruel a trick of the universe to have someone so uniquely skilled, so bright-burning with the desire to do good for people, killed in middle age, right at the start of his criminal career. There need to be more thieves with morals. Like Buddy Aurinko, like Juno Steel. 

It takes a strong kind of person to commit to doing good, and Peter knows, because he failed at it a long time ago. 

After the meeting ends, he finds himself cornered by Buddy. This is exactly the outcome he had been hoping to avoid: somehow, despite his saying nothing to the effect, she has read him to his core. She lays him out flat for his debts, and even hints at being aware of his potential to betray them. 

After Buddy leaves, Nureyev takes her advice and decides to meditate on the words she’s left him with. He lies back on his bed and tries to sort out the cluttered files in his mind. 

The items that they are stealing are all mythical in their own right. The Gilded Globe was the least expensive of them all, but the key to one of the great M’tendere’s weapons, the Book, and of course the Blade, are each more expensive in turn. If he were to take those, the topaz he stole for Buddy originally, and the Ruby, they could come close to covering his debts. They would at least get him out of serious trouble. If he could find a way to steal those things without endangering the mission or the crew, while still providing Dark Matters with enough intel to find his contribution worthwhile…

Who is he kidding? This is Dark Matters. They are sneaky, and sly, and it is unlikely he will get out of his debt with them as simply as that. It is always sticky dealing with Dark Matters. He has friends in high places he could turn to who may be able to put a word in for him... some old contacts from the jobs he’s had to pull in Dark Matters before.

He frowns. Come to think of it, wasn’t one of those jobs on Mars? 

As with any of the memories tainted by the remnants of his disease, the details quickly slip out of his hands, and he finds himself staring up at the ceiling trying to remember what it is that he had been thinking about just a second ago when someone knocks at the door.

Nureyev sits up, “Yes, yes, come in.” 

The door opens to reveal his companion of the day — Juno Steel. He’s changed into something more casual, a pair of sweatpants and a loose-fitting t-shirt that falls away from his shoulders and shows just a few curls of the hair on his chest before it disappears beneath the hem of his shirt. In short, Nureyev discovers that Juno Steel is as appealing to him in PJs as he is in a golden gown. 

“Detective Steel,” Nureyev says politely, “How are you doing? I have been meaning to congratulate you properly on the job tonight. Thanks to your perceptiveness, we completed the job in half the time we would have.”

“Heh, uh. Yeah. According to Rita, she already has people out searching for us. Reckons I kidnapped you away from her. That makes my first ever wanted poster, so I guess… a milestone for me?”

Nureyev grins, “I remember my first wanted poster. It truly is a moment worth celebrating.” 

Juno is still hovering around the entrance to his room. Nureyev pats the end of his bed, “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

“Oh. Uh,” Juno steps into the room, hesitates, and then walks over to the bed, “I guess I just wanted to congratulate you as well. It was pretty fun out there, Euanthe. I had a good time.”

“Quite! We’ll have to find some sort of excuse to infiltrate a ball together again one day,” Nureyev says. 

Juno snorts and glances away from Nureyev, “Honestly? I can’t believe I did as well as I did. It feels a lot more high-stakes than detective work, I tell you that.” 

“Never a dull moment,” Nureyev agrees. He sighs, and lies back on the bed. “Tell me about yourself, Juno.”

“I—uh, what?”

Nureyev shrugs. “We are to be working together for quite some time, I imagine. It does us no harm to try and get to know each other a little, does it?” 

Another move out of turn — Nureyev usually tries not to speak unless spoken to, to evade anything resembling  _ bonding  _ between the people he works with. In his head he hears the excuse: that this is different, it is long term. Besides, Juno interests him and he still hasn’t figured out whether or not he knows more about Nureyev than he lets on. He clings to it. It is nicer to believe that than to believe he might be engaging Juno in conversation out of… out of whatever insignificant emotion or feeble desire may inspire him to do so. 

“Right,” Juno says. “Right. Um,” the bed jostles as Juno sits down on it. 

“Well, uh… I don’t really know what there is to say. I’m a decent cook. Collector of terrible art. Pretty good sharpshooter—used to be. Used to be a pretty good sharpshooter, before I… you know. Lost my eye.”

“I had wondered whether or not it was the result of an injury,” Nureyev props himself up on his elbows, “Forgive me my incessant curiosity, do tell me if I’m being too invasive. Did you lose it on a job?”

Juno reacts strangely to his question. Firstly, his entire body seems to tense up, and the look on his face is distinctly hurt, and distantly angry — as though Nureyev has said something he knew would upset Juno on purpose. Then it shifts, and the new look is resigned, and sad. Deeply sad. The tension in his body melts away, and a dry laugh escapes him.

“Yeah. Tried to kill myself to save a guy. It’s a long story,” he says. “Part of the reason why I’m… you know. Growing a goddamn garden in my lungs.” 

“Oh,” Nureyev says softly. “Juno, I’m sorry. I suppose I should have anticipated the answer would be so personal, but I hadn’t expected it to be as personal as that.” 

Juno shrugs a shoulder, “’S’alright, mostly. I mean… I dunno. I try not to dwell on regretting it. Past is in the past, I guess. Just gotta work on making sure I never do something stupid like that again.” 

Juno is brazenly honest, and the air in the room feels heavier. It presses tight against Nureyev’s liar’s heart. Honesty in people has always frightened him. Other people seem to be able to make peace with their past, and gift it freely into the laps of others. The pressure to return the favour is intense.

Nureyev sits up. He takes Juno’s hand in his. Juno jolts at the touch and Nureyev goes to take his hand away, “I’m sorry—”

“It’s fine—sorry,” Juno says over the top of him, and he goes to take Nureyev’s hand, but Nureyev has already pulled his back, and for a moment there’s an awkward flip-flop of gestures between them and then Juno starts laughing.

“This is stupid,” Juno says.

“I’m afraid it is,” Nureyev agrees.

“I’m glad that you made it here,” Nureyev says. “If you don’t mind me saying so, Juno, I for one feel lucky to have met you. And I imagine you’ll be an invaluable asset to this crew.”

Juno looks away from him. He clears his throat, and stands up. 

“I… thanks. It means a lot. Look, I should, um… go. I promised Rita I’d watch a movie with her, and I know you don’t know her that well, but trust me when I say you don’t wanna keep Rita waiting.” 

“…Right,” Nureyev says, a little perplexed by Juno’s sudden change in attitude. “Well, I’ll see you at the family meeting tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Um. See you then. Bye, Hiko.”

Juno leaves the room, and Nureyev sits on the end of his bed, suddenly struck by the oddest sensation of being… almost disappointed that Juno had called him by his alias. 

Peculiar.


	5. white chrysanthemum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly I wanna thank one of my IRLs Jen, who will probably never see this, but who surprised me on my birthday with art for this AU despite not even being a TPP fan 😭😭🥺 But who also apparently scrolled all the way through my twitter far enough back to find a time I'd RT'd the old official art which honestly is terrifying cause fuck knows what cringe things I've said that she saw. Anyways.
> 
> CW for this fic for character death (Tools of Rust), and serious discussion of mortality. 
> 
> Thank you SO MUCH!!!!!! to Percy for helping sensitivity read and correct the segment with Jewish Juno. YTB !!!!!

Living with Nureyev doesn’t get any easier with time.

You’d think it would be easier that ‘Hiko Euanthe’ is the type to default to keeping to himself. What Juno finds, instead, is that every time he walks past Nureyev’s room and knows he’s inside, he has to resist the urge to ask to go in and just… be with him for a bit. To  _ talk  _ to him, the way they used to talk. All this time, and Juno still wants to know all the things he never was able to about Peter Nureyev.

That being said, he still slips up with the things he  _ does  _ know about Nureyev, and that gets bad quickly. One day, Juno finds a crumpled piece of paper near the coffee machine. He cringes when he unfolds it and remembers throwing scraps just like it at Nureyev’s face over a year ago. Then he smiles, because it’s cute that after all this time the habit hasn’t shaken, and he goes to return the little doodle to Nureyev.

Which is where it gets complicated, because Juno so easily  _ forgets  _ that they’re not on casual, comfortable terms. Nureyev doesn’t smile or laugh when Juno returns the doodle. His face goes a little tighter around the edges, and when he slips back into his room Juno knows he won’t be finding any more doodles like it around the ship anymore. 

Worst still is when Nureyev  _ is  _ being friendly, though, because when he talks to Juno like he doesn’t know him at all, it’s painful like Juno hadn’t known pain could feel. When he’s part of the crew discussions, Juno has to look at the way his sharp teeth peek out between his lips when he smiles and look at the sparkle in his dark eyes when he’s being mischievous. Every time Juno gets caught staring at him, he swears he can  _ feel  _ the thorns in his lungs scratching him up from the inside out as he breathes.

They just have to get to the end of the job, and everything will be fine. Nureyev will be able to go his separate way, and maybe Juno will be cured and be able to go  _ his  _ separate way and… and that will be the best possible outcome. Juno guesses. If he doesn’t die first.

And it turns out that they work just as well together in a team as coworkers as they did as… as whatever they were back then. Vespa, Juno, and Nureyev get deposited on Neptune to apprehend M’tendere and it goes… mostly smoothly. Even with a crowd of spook-suited agents surrounding the apartment, they manage to carve themselves a path out and take the car back to the Carte Blanche.

The adrenaline is still high in Juno the whole way back to the ship.

“I mean— I mean, that was fucking wild. I was really frightened for a while there. Not my first run in with Dark Matters, but usually I’m working  _ with _ them, not against them. Or… something like that.”

“You, working with Dark Matters?” Nureyev raises his eyebrows, “And here I thought you were the anti-authority type. There’s no real body of authority with a further reach than Dark Matters.”

“Okay, sure, but it doesn’t mean they haven’t, y’know… assigned me some cases sometimes. Job is a job, Euanthe. You telling me you’ve never done a job with Dark Matters before?” 

“Of course not,” Nureyev says quickly. Then something strange crosses his face. After a second’s pause, he frowns, “At least… not that I can remember.”

“The hell do you mean by that?” Vespa hisses, “I think you’d remember if you worked with Dark Matters,  _ Hiko. _ ” 

Nureyev says nothing to that, and Juno feels his heart in his throat. The rest of the ride home to the Blanche is filled with tension from both Vespa and Nureyev, and Juno is glad when they get back to the ship.

They can’t fully celebrate the end of their job until Jet and Rita are successfully retrieved from their interaction with M’tendere, hopefully with the Key in tow. The idea of Rita stuck down there, surrounded by Dark Matters agents and with the most dangerous person in Sol is… pretty fucking terrifying, even with Jet there to protect her. 

Nureyev seems to catch onto Juno’s nervousness. He sits down on the barstool beside him while Juno pours himself a second drink. 

“Everything alright, detective?”

Juno shrugs a shoulder, “Will be as soon as we get everyone back safe.”

“Mm,” Nureyev agrees. “She’ll be alright, Juno. I may not know you or Rita very well, but I do know two things: firstly, she means a lot to you. Secondly, she’s much smarter than she looks. And she’s down there with the best person she probably could be. If my assessment of their relationship is at all correct, it seems deeply unlikely that Jet would be the kind to allow her to be in harm’s way.” 

Juno looks up at Nureyev. His expression is serious, and fuck if that isn’t just as an attractive look on him as his smile is. He’s so goddamn pretty it’s unfair, and more than anything, Juno wants to grab him by the front of his shirt and pull him into a kiss. 

Instead, he starts coughing, and Nureyev rubs circles into Juno’s back until he’s finished, a new slush of rose petals mushed up in his hand. Juno swallows down the taste of blood and perfume and clears his throat. “Thanks, Euanthe. You don’t have to do that — help me through it. It’s not the nicest thing. Stupid fucking disease.”

“I… know,” Nureyev says gently, and Juno looks up at him.

Nureyev is looking back at him with a sort of blank look on his face. He looks like he’s not all that there, or like he’s surprising even himself when he talks. “I know what you’re going through.”

“You, uh…” Juno swallows. “You mean…”

“I had hanahaki,” Nureyev says quietly. “I had surgery to cure myself of it. I can’t remember how I acquired the disease in the first place, but… the feeling. The sensation of flowers trying to force themselves up my throat… I remember that well.”

Juno stares at him. He can feel his heart in his ears and his throat feels tight. “Fuck,” slips out of his mouth, and Nureyev moves away from him, seemingly startled.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I… don’t know why I shared that. I shouldn’t have—Juno.”

“T’s fine,” Juno says, wiping rapidly at his eye to clear up the tear that had started forming on his lashes, “Don’t—sorry. I… maybe we can talk about this another time.”

“Of course,” Nureyev says, and Juno slips off his barstool and flees from the room. 

This is so fucking stupid he can’t believe it. It’s not like he didn’t already know that Nureyev had had the surgery — it was practically obvious from the second that they locked eyes in the Carte Blanche for the first time. 

But something about Nureyev telling Juno himself hits different. It’s just another slap in the face, another  _ fuck you  _ from the Universe about the past the two of them shared.

Jet and Rita get back from the mission unhurt, thanks to the Ruby 7 — which apparently literally escaped from the ship to go and get them — but they don’t come back alone. 

Juno swears under his breath when he sees the body in Jet’s arms.

At first, he doesn’t feel sorry for them. If there’s such a thing as a true villain, after all, M’tendere fits the definition word for word. But when he sees Jet’s eyes full of tears he knows something must have happened down there. When Buddy asks what happened and Jet explains, Juno’s heart twists.

Maybe M’tendere can’t be forgiven, but they died trying to do good for people. Honest good. If Juno’s learned anything over the past year, it’s that maybe that’s what counts in the end.

M’tendere’s body is to stay on the floor in storage while they finish the family briefing. It feels… sickening, but Juno isn’t sure how to even start to ask Buddy if they could do anything like shmira for them, keep their body guarded right up until their makeshift funeral. He’s not even sure how he feels about sitting shmira at all -- with the amount of bodies he’s left behind him, it feels like too little too late to start going by the book now. But still. Still.

Buddy must catch his fidgeting, because she stops him at the door. “Everything alright, Juno?”

Juno considers lying, and feels his skin crawl at the idea of leaving M’tendere alone in there. “I… do you mind if I stay with the body?”

Buddy blinks at him, “Whyever for?”

Juno squirms under her gaze and refuses to meet her eyes, “Uh. Tradition reasons. Hard to explain.”

Immediately, her gaze softens, “I’m sorry, Juno. I’m only a little frazzled, darling. Do as you wish. We’ll collect you when it’s time for the funeral.”

“Thanks,” Juno sighs out, and ducks away from her touch to go sit beside them.

It’s Juno’s first funeral in space, and it’s not exactly… nice. M’tendere doesn’t get the luxury of a box, or being buried underground. Nobody has much to say about the matter. Jet cries. So does Rita, by his side and holding on to one of his massive hands. Juno just stares at the body, and at some point he finally snaps.

“Hey, do you— uh. Mind if I say a blessing, real quick?” he asks Buddy just before M’tendere is loaded into the airlock. She gestures for him to step forward. 

Juno kneels beside M’tendere’s body. The language feels weird in his mouth, but he thinks he gets the general gist of it right, “Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu melech ha’loam, dayan ha’emet.”

M’tendere’s body gets ejected out of the airlock and into space.

Juno watches it float for a moment before he feels absolutely sick right through to his stomach and goes to wash his hands in the bathroom.

Is that what’s going to happen to him?

He can’t help but think about it. Sure, the whole plan is to get the Curemother prime. And if it really exists, and if it really does what the legends say it does, then… sure. Everything will be fine. But if something happens — fuck, even if they’re delayed a few weeks — then is that the same fate that Juno is consigned to? 

Nobody will even know the words to bless his body if he dies. All he’ll get is the cold embrace of the void around him, and that… that would be that. He’d become space junk. Floating aimlessly around.

It’s not really the idea of death that frightens him, but his whole life he’s known exactly where his sorry body will end up one day. In the plot right next to his brother’s, across the cemetery from his mother’s. Benzaiten and Juno Steel, reunited in death. 

Juno can’t sleep that night. Every time he closes his eyes, he can see M’tendere’s floating body out there. M’tendere’s skin is close to the same shade as Juno’s is, and if they were just a little bigger it wouldn’t even be too hard to substitute the image of M’tendere’s body with his own. 

In fact, it’s incredibly easy to do so. His brain makes sure to let him know that several times. 

Late at night, Juno wanders back out into the Carte Blanche sitting room. His fingers itch for the alcohol kept in the kitchen cupboards — nobody would blame him, probably. Except maybe Vespa, but hell, she already judges him for just walking around and breathing so that isn’t exactly the biggest loss. 

Eventually he decides he can’t be bothered to get drunk, and so he sits down on the couch in the sitting room and just… looks at the wall, blankly. He isn’t even thinking of anything in particular. Actually, he’s doing his absolute best not to think hard at all. He just wants a break from everything.

* * *

When Nureyev walks into the common room, there’s a figure sitting in the dark on the couch.

Nureyev falters in the doorway, unsure of whether to leave now or alert whoever it is to his presence. They’re just sitting, silent and unmoving. He can only see the hunch of their back – their front half is lost to the surrounding darkness.

They haven’t noticed him, despite being the only blockage in the room’s singular source of light.

Nureyev takes a deep breath, and makes sure his footsteps can be heard as he steps into the room.

The figure shifts in his direction with an instinctual quickness. Vespa, perhaps, or Juno – the two of them are the right kind of rough around the edges for that kind of response, though he hasn’t spent enough time around Buddy to eliminate her as a candidate. Nureyev puts up both his hands, “Only me. May I turn the light on?”

“Oh. Hey… Hiko.”

Juno, then. Nureyev flicks on the light.

Juno Steel is quick to his defences, often one to pick bickering fights with others – indicative, as are his scars, of a bumpy upbringing. He supposes that makes sense, having been brought up in Hyperion City. The people there, Nureyev has heard, aren’t awfully pleasant.

But he’s different around Nureyev. Quiet, withdrawn. Hurt. He’s softer with him than he is with the others, less likely to bark in his face.

Nureyev supposes it’s to do with his condition. The disease. He can’t imagine what it’s like to sit dying from a condition one of your colleagues survived with such little scarring.

If Juno were angry at him, perhaps, it would be easier not to care. But the sad, wistful looks Juno gives him, the softness he shows Nureyev that he shows no other member of this crew, eats away at the inside of Nureyev’s ribs.

Guilty is something Peter Nureyev usually  _ is _ ; it’s rarely something he  _ feels _ .

“Can’t sleep either?” Juno asks. His voice says  _ stay, please. _

It’s not a good thing, to feel indebted to a near-stranger. Certainly not something Nureyev should give into – something he should fold neatly away. Even if he’s the only other person on this ship who has been through  _ anything  _ like what Juno is going through right now, is the only person who might be able to give him some comfort tonight.

Nureyev sits down on the couch beside him.

“Are you okay?” he asks, and the softness in his own voice surprises him.

Juno just laughs softly. “Of course I’m okay. What reason could I possibly have to not be okay for?” he asks, his voice dry.

“Sorry,” Nureyev says.

Juno says nothing after that. His elbows rest on his knees and he stares into the gap between them. The bad feeling radiating off of him is so strong, that Nureyev almost feels a little sick.

After a long moment, Juno speaks. “What’s it like?” he asks. His voice is a little rough, “Having the surgery.”

Peter purses his lips. He swallows once, then clears his throat, “Well. I wasn’t conscious for it, so I suppose I can’t really say.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Juno says.

Peter knows. He sighs. He’s not sure talking about what it’s like being free of this disease is going to be the  _ most  _ supportive thing for Juno to hear right now. He twists a ring on his finger absentmindedly.

Then again, it is uncomfortable not having his memories. Maybe Juno is looking to hear that, to feel as though his outcome is the better of the two.

“Odd,” Peter says at last. “I…know some facts, but not others. I know I was on Mars last year, to complete a few thieveries. Some of those heists are fuzzier than others. I can’t remember how he was involved. A partner in crime, I assume, perhaps a contact supplied to me by my employer? I know we kissed, we… had sex, but I can’t remember how his body felt, how he sounded, what he liked. It’s not… a comfortable feeling, Juno. I can’t explain why I am clearer on some details than others.”

He shrugs his shoulders, “I suppose the only positive part is that I’m not that hurt over it all. He left me, in the end. I… behaved regrettably in the months after that, spurned on by bitterness.” There’s a bad taste in his mouth. He’s not usually this open, not with anybody. Juno seems to have a habit of pulling confessions from him. “After the surgery, I lost that sense of bitterness. It… allowed me to move forward with my life.”

Juno bobs his head in a stiff nod. “Sounds like it’s probably for the best that you forgot him.”

“I… suppose. Yes,” Nureyev admits. So much for helping Juno feel at peace. “I’m… sorry. That you weren’t able to access surgery.”

Juno laughs shortly. “Actually, I… was offered it free of charge.”

Nureyev blinks. Questions form behind his teeth faster than Plutonian sand-flies on fresh meat, but he doesn’t know how to be tactful about asking them. “You didn’t take it?” Nureyev asks-not-asks.

Juno clasps his hands together, and admits, “I… didn’t want to forget him.”

The air in the room seems to get a little heavier. The words ring in Nureyev’s ears. “Wow,” is all he can say. “That’s… very noble.”

“Not really,” Juno grunts. “I broke his heart. I’m the reason this stupid thing happened. When I realised what was happening to me, it felt like I had… a responsibility to live with the consequences of my actions. Like having surgery would just be trying to run from my punishment.”

Nureyev feels a spike of panic, “Surely you don’t mean to suggest  _ death  _ is an appropriate punishment for breaking someone’s heart! Juno, you don’t deserve to  _ die _ , no matter what you did. It couldn’t have been that bad.”

“I was in a bad place, alright?” Juno snaps at him, “And yeah. I get it now. I’ve grown a lot, and I’ve realised he’s moved the fuck on with his life, and that I don’t deserve to die for what I did. I finally want to live for the first goddamn time since I was ten years old, and it all has to happen  _ just  _ as I find out it’s too late, I’m not going to make it.”

Juno huffs and settles back into his slouch. His fingers grip each other and he shakes his head, “I’m sorry—”

“No,” Nureyev says, “I’m sorry. I was trying to help, but—”

“I was already brooding. I can’t deal with any problems without fucking lashing out at people,” Juno scrubs a hand over his face. “Whatever. I didn’t have surgery. It was my choice. You don’t have to deal with me complaining.”

“I think you have every right—”

“Let’s… change the subject, okay?”

Nureyev presses his lips together in a tight line. He glances across the room and reminds himself of a far-off promise he once made not to get himself involved with Juno Steel and his life choices, just because they shared an experience of this disease.

“What was he like?” Nureyev asks at last.

Juno laughs a little wildly, a little derisively, as though Nureyev’s asked a stupid question. He goes to take it back when Juno speaks.

“Handsome. Hot. Smart. Good kisser. He made me feel… worth it, I guess. Like he’d go through anything for me. I dunno. I guess my idea of him was mostly a fantasy. Like some perfect stranger had come in to sweep me off my feet and fix me.” Juno ducks his head, almost guiltily, “I guess his idea of me was a fantasy, too. The person he wanted to run away with didn’t… ruin relationships, or get drunk instead of going to therapy, or spend days in bed when his mental health got bad. That was what frightened me away, in the end. He told me he loved me. I didn’t… I don’t know. It all got too real.”

Nureyev nods slowly. He doesn’t quite know what to say, without the full story. The lady sitting beside him is roguishly handsome, with a hint of bravery and adventure around him that he can’t deny is alluring. He can see how easy it would be to build him up into being the sort of fantasy Nureyev himself may even have been fooled by. Juno has a self-deprecating streak, but without having seen evidence of his destructive behaviour for himself, Nureyev feels unequipped to comment on whether his thoughts and actions seem justified.

Juno clears his throat, “If I could see him again,” he starts, entirely unprompted, “I’d want him to know I’m sorry. That just because I was scared didn’t justify the way I tore us apart, that even if he doesn’t even know who I am anymore, I still care about him. I’m still sorry, and it eats me up every day of my life that I ever caused him so much pain.”

“Even if he had no idea what I was talking about,” Juno’s voice wavers off, “I’d still want him to know.”

Nureyev… isn’t too sure what exactly all of that means. But it seems important for Juno to apologise to  _ someone _ , so he puts his hand – after a moment’s hesitation – onto Juno’s back, and pats him softly.

Juno weeps quietly as Peter comforts him. He’s not very used to comforting others, but Juno seems content just to lean into his side while Peter shushes him softly and rubs his back.

Then Juno takes a shuddering breath and stands up all of a sudden. “I can’t do this,” he says. “I’m sorry, Nureyev. I have to go.”

He starts coughing just as he reaches the door, almost doubling over with the force as he crosses the threshold. Nureyev listens to his hacking cough, and feels something prickle at the corners of his consciousness.

Nureyev goes to stand. Then his ears, all of a sudden, catch up to his brain. The blood freezes in his veins. 

He had always thought there was something about the way Juno Steel looked at him. 

Nureyev sits back down, and covers his mouth with his hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> every time i read this chapter i'm like 'omg this plot point happens SO EARLY in the fic' and then i remember at this point we're like over 30k in
> 
> if you think the angst ends here... you're wrong


	6. forget-me-not

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> juno steel queen of setting boundaries !
> 
> i'm bad at responding to comments bc they overwhelm me but believe me when i say i have been continuously overwhelmed in the best way by everyone's kindness and i treasure you all so much, and i'll do my best to respond when i can !
> 
> CWs: i dont think any apply to this chapter except potentially sexual references

Juno gets halfway down the hall towards his room when he realises exactly what he’s said and swears. He darts back out into the living room to try and explain himself — and finds it empty.

“Fuck,” Juno says again, and walks into the middle of the room before he pauses, unsure of what his next moves actually are.

Surely Nureyev can connect the dots about how exactly Juno knows his name, but he still must have questions — hundreds of them — that Juno can probably answer. He could head to Nureyev’s room and try to talk this out with him.

Or… he could… not.

It’s not problem avoidance if he has a reason for it, right? And… Nureyev probably needs a good amount of time to himself to process through all this stuff. Even if Juno went and talked to him and he seemed fine, he probably would be freaking out subliminally. So… it’s a good decision to turn 180 degrees and head straight down the hallway towards Rita’s room. 

Rita’s light is still on. It’s almost 4am, and she could either still be awake or have just woken up, but Juno doesn’t care. He’s just glad that she’s around. He knocks.

“Hello?” Rita’s croaky voice floats out to the hallway, “Who is it? Wait! Don’t answer, let me guess! Is it someone in grave danger who needs rescuing by a pretty dame?!”

Juno sighs and leans his head against her door, “Pretty much.”

“I thought so, Mista Steel. Come on in.”

When he opens the door to her room, he has to take a step back again, “Oh—uh…” 

“You can just ignore him, Mista Steel. What can I do for you?”

Jet has his eyes glued to the screen. His long hair has been braided through with plastic flowers and his face has been done up in makeup that matches Rita’s.

Right — Juno’s not the only one who’s been through kind of a lot today, and it makes sense that Rita would do what she can for Jet. There have been more than a few nights where Juno has woken up the next morning with what he refers to as breakdown braids in his hair and glitter on his face.

“Um…” Juno stands, indecisive in the doorway, until Rita meets eyes with him properly.

“Am I fired, boss?” she asks, and Juno sighs with relief.

“Yeah, if that’s okay. Like… now?” 

“I’ll be right back, Mista Jet,” she pats his shoulder, and slips off the bed. 

Jet makes a soft grunt as response, and Juno is craning his neck to try and see what it is that's got the Big Guy so attached to the screen when Rita pushes past him into the hallway and gestures for him to follow.

“Alright, where are we going?” she asks.

“Out here is fine, I guess. I think I messed up, Rita,” Juno leans back against the wall of the hallway and groans. 

“Messed up how, Mista Steel? Messed up like you forgot the password to your bank account again? Or messed up like ‘uh oh, you're gonna have to save the day again, Rita, like you always gotta do eventually cause you're just oh so smart and talented’.”

“The second one,” Juno says, and Rita puffs out her cheeks.

“It’s not mind reading robo-chips again, right?”

“I told Euanthe he gave me hanahaki,” Juno blurts out at once.

“What?!” Rita almost jumps out of her skin, “What happened?! Did he say sorry? Did he kiss you and make everything better?”

“No, Rita,” Juno drags one hand down his face, “He left.”

“He left? Or... did you run away?”

Juno groans.

“Because you kinda have a habit of running away when conversations get really tough, and it’s not like I can blame you cause sometimes I sure feel like running away too when things are tough! But, um, maybe that’s not the best idea in this case especially not when he could fix you, Mista Steel!”

Juno can’t stop from sounding irritated, “Rita, for the last goddamn time, he’s not going to fix me, okay? All that’s happened here is I just made my next few months really fucking complicated, and maybe just put a whole bunch of guilt on a guy that doesn’t deserve it.”

“But Mista—”

The old Juno Steel probably would’ve really lost his head at this point. Juno can feel those old instincts crawling around inside him, too, almost ready to jump out and act before he can stop them. But he does, and in the split second it takes for him to overwrite his instincts, he cuts Rita off, “I really know you’re trying to be helpful, Rita, but talking like him being in love with me again is a possibility kind of fucks with my head, alright? So just… drop it,  _ please _ .”

Rita deflates like a popped balloon. “Alright, Mista Steel. That’s fair,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry.” 

“It’s fine. I just… I really want your advice on how I should, like… approach this conversation, I guess? Because I don’t want to fuck things up for anybody on this ship,” Juno scrubs his face with his hands again, “This is so stupid, fuck.”

“Hey, hey,” Rita steps forwards and reaches up to pull at his arms until he lowers them and she can take his hands in hers. “Look, Mista Steel. I reckon the first big step is for you to go and get some sleep. You ain’t gonna be able to make any sense if you’re tired, especially not for the sort of big conversation that’s gonna have to happen between you two. I know you probably feel like you have to do something about this right now—”

“Actually, Rita, that’s great advice,” Juno says, “The less quickly I have to deal with this, the better.”

“That’s— not exactly what I was suggesting, Mista Steel,” Rita says. She sighs and swings his hands. “When you talk to him, what are you worried that he’s gonna want to talk about that you might not be able to handle?”

Juno closes his eyes. What could Nureyev ask him that he can’t handle? A lot, actually. He’s not sure he can recount the whole Miasma thing, even if that’s probably going to be the part that Nureyev will be the most interested in. He doesn’t really want to talk about the stupid shit he said earlier in the living room, either — about choosing not to take the surgery because he felt like it was his fault that he pulled the two of them apart. He tells Rita as much as vaguely as possible.

“Well… I dunno, Mista Steel. As much as Mista Euanthe might be curious to know about the stuff that involves him, he also made the choice to give up those memories. And you don’t owe it to him to give them back, not if that’s a boundary for you.” 

Juno sighs, “Okay, well… how am I meant to explain that to him? Sorry, I can’t tell you anything about all the memories of me you lost, I just don’t feel like it?”

“Exactly like that, boss!” Rita says cheerfully, “Now you go get as good a night’s sleep as you can and tomorrow you can go face that scary conversation.” 

“Right…” Juno says, looking down the hallway back towards his room. It’s… dark. It won’t be when he starts walking down it — the automatic lights will switch on the second he heads down there, but the thought of disappearing into that shadow anyways just reminds him of what’s waiting for him by the time he gets to his destination: a cold bed, and likely one hell of a sleepless night.

“Boss?” Rita asks him, and Juno looks back down at her.

“Uh—yeah?” 

“Do you wanna stay with me and Mista Jet a little longer?” she asks. “I think he could kinda use the company, yanno. Really, I’m sort of asking you a favour to help him out, and it’s got absolutely nothing to do with you at all.”

Juno smiles, “That sounds good, Rita.”

“…Can I braid your hair?” Rita asks.

Juno rolls his eye, “Fine, as long as you take them all back out when you’re done.”

“Yay! You’re the best, Mista Steel!” Rita crows, and pulls him back towards her room by the arm.

They have a good night. Jet doesn’t say an awful lot, but he’s fully absorbed in his TV show about cartoon horses that can do magic, or something like that. Juno and Rita paint each other’s nails. Juno only coughs flowers out of his lungs once or twice, and apart from that it’s almost easy to forget that he’s got flower spitting disease at all. 

He’s not sure when he falls asleep — somewhere between Rita explaining the plot of  _ Cows With Persecution Complexes 5: Mootual Distrust _ and Rita opening her fifth bag of snacks — but he wakes up alone in the room, surrounded in the glittery aftermath of a night with Rita. 

Breakfast has probably already started. The thought of going out there and being in the same room as Nureyev again makes something squirm in his chest like a nest of ice-cold worms. He stands in front of the mirror and makes sure all of Rita’s braids have in fact been removed from his hair and there’s not too much glitter in obvious places, and then he decides to head out to brave the oncoming conversation.

“Juno! How lovely of you to decide to join us,” Buddy says as he walks into the room. Everybody is sitting around the table, and Juno can’t help himself from immediately looking Nureyev’s way. 

He doesn’t make eye contact with him. He’s staring very nonchalantly at a spot on the table, but the second Juno looks back to Buddy, he can feel his gaze on him. 

“Yeah, sorry I’m sick and, like, battling a terminal illness,” Juno grumbles, and sits down at the breakfast table.

Buddy raises an eyebrow at him, but doesn’t comment on it before she launches into the day’s briefing. The next big heist that they have is for the blade, and it’s going to be one that takes a lot of concentration and good timing. Fortunately, it’s still a while off, and the briefing is short. Juno shovels down the food Jet made (Jet, it turns out, is a great cook — but weirdly only for breakfast? Which doesn’t really make any sense at all) and wonders if maybe Nureyev doesn’t actually want to have the conversation with him.

Maybe Nureyev is totally absolutely fine about this new turn of events. He could be, right…?

No. Juno actually can’t convince himself of that no matter what he tries. Instead he just holds tight onto his coffee mug and tries to focus on what Rita and Jet are saying about the TV series they had been watching last night. 

Juno’s plan after breakfast is to sort of slip out of the room as fast as possible and regroup his thoughts, maybe go visit Nureyev the second he has the... something… that he needs to go do it. What happens instead is that Juno goes to leave and finds himself stopped with slender fingers around his wrist.

“I think you and I need to have a little talk,” Nureyev says, from close behind him, and Juno cringes to himself for a moment before he turns around.

“Uh… yeah. Yeah, we, um… probably should.” 

“I went to your room last night, but you weren’t there,” Nureyev says. It’s almost accusatory. 

“Yeah. I stayed with Rita. I was… sort of shaken up. We can go to my room now if you want. It’s, like… private, I guess.”

Nureyev nods and Juno turns. 

This is the absolute nightmare scenario, he figures, but whatever. He leads Nureyev back through the ship towards his room in complete silence, trying to focus on the bolts and spots in the metal so he doesn’t think about just how terribly this conversation could go. 

Juno’s room is pretty tidy. That’s partly because he’s sort of still living out of his suitcase, but also, he knows how to look after a place, and these days he actually feels like he can keep on top of one. He invites Nureyev to sit down on the end of the bed and is glad he hadn’t left any dirty underwear or anything else… more incriminating… around where it could be easily in view. 

“So,” Nureyev says, and crosses one leg over the other, raising an eyebrow, “You gave me quite the surprise last night.” 

Juno laughs weakly and sits down beside him. “Um, yeah. Sort of figured that the second I walked away from you. I went back to… say something? But you hightailed it out of there pretty fast.”

Nureyev nods, “I didn’t know how to handle what you’d said. Still not sure if I do. Allow me to ask you some questions, will you, Juno?”

Juno swallows. He feels Rita’s words in his throat, about setting the boundary that Nureyev can’t ask him about anything he doesn’t want to talk about. Then he swallows them back down. “Yeah. Sure, N—E—what should I call you?”

Nureyev glances at the closed door, and then back at Juno. He watches him carefully, “I told you my name. Is that correct?” 

“Yeah,” Juno says. “The day we met actually.”

That takes Nureyev by surprise. He blinks, “The day we met? As in… within twenty four hours?”

“Within, like, six?” Juno can’t help but feel a little amused that Nureyev is surprised by his own eagerness. “You— okay, do you want the story of how we met from the start?” 

“Please. Do you mind if I write some of this down?” Nureyev asks, pulling a notepad and pen out of his endless pockets after a little bit of fiddling.

“Sure. I was assigned to a case back on Mars with the Kanagawas — family of stream stars, none of them any good.  _ You  _ were pretending to be the Dark Matters agent that was assigned to work with me to figure out what the hell was going on. It was some ancient Martian alien mask thing that we later found out was part of a scheme to end humanity, no big deal.”

“No big… alright,” Nureyev says, looking up from the notepad, “Then what?” 

“Well… I dunno. The details don’t really matter, I guess. I can fill you in on them another time if you _really_ want. We got out of there, solved the murder, and…  _ that’s  _ when you invited yourself back to my place.”

“Invited myself?” Nureyev raises an eyebrow.

“Basically. You complained about the cold, and when I told you the restaurants were closed, you said that’s not what you meant, and I… uh.”

“Invited me back to your place?” there’s something akin to a smirk on his face now, and Juno glares at him.

“It was part of my investigation. I knew you were in on the heist somehow, and I had to figure out how. That moment came when you—uh. When you… kissed me.”  Juno clears his throat, “You tried to steal the keys from my pocket, and when you stopped kissing me, I… uh. Handcuffed you.” 

Nureyev’s pen pauses, and both of his eyebrows raise again. 

“I turned you into the cops, you tried to convince me into running away with you, and after the pigs had taken you away, that’s when I saw it.”

“It?”

Juno shifts on the bed. “Uh… actually, hold on.” He stands up, leaving Nureyev twisting around on the bed to try and see him. He slips into his cupboard and finds his bag. 

It takes a bit of shuffling around, but soon enough Juno finds it — the little bag he’d stuffed all his keepsakes into and brought with him onboard the ship. The note inside it is faded by now, and well-creased. It feels like it could disintegrate in his hands if he isn’t careful with it.

He takes it back out into the room, and holds it out to Nureyev.

“Oh,” Nureyev puts down his notepad and takes the note from Juno’s outstretched hands.

He reads in silence. After he’s done, he puts the note down on the end of the bed. “Well,” he says softly.

“Yeah. You—” Juno goes to say something comforting that probably would’ve fallen flat if he’s honest with himself, when Nureyev talks over him.

“How embarrassing,” he says. 

Juno blinks, “Huh?” 

“Well, you have to admit that. I can see why you didn’t take me very seriously. That note is simply painfully lovelorn.”

Juno sits back down on the bed and takes it back from Nureyev. “I… never thought that,” he says quietly.

When he looks back up, Nureyev is staring at him with a calculating look in his eyes. 

“What?” Juno asks.

“There’s something very special about you, Juno,” Nureyev says. “I wouldn’t have told my name that quickly to just anybody. I haven’t spent much time with you aboard this ship, outside of our occasional heists. I noticed then, that you were something special, but not as intensely as I obviously did back then.”

He cocks his head slightly, “I wonder what it is that made me fall so hard for you so quickly. Something about you having caught me, perhaps?”

“I…” Juno shifts and swallows, “Can you… not, maybe?”

“Pardon?”

“Talk about me like that. Like you’re… surprised that you actually found something worthwhile in me back then. I get that’s probably not what you mean, and, like, circumstances were different back then, and you’re just curious, and shit? But I’m not a puzzle for you to solve. I’m right here.” 

“Of course,” Nureyev leans back a little. “I’m sorry, Juno.”

Juno shrugs. 

“Can you tell me more about our time together?” Nureyev asks, and Juno sighs.

“Maybe not all at once, alright? It’s… kind of a really heavy story. And it might be new and exciting to you, but some of these memories… still aren’t so nice for me,” Juno says.

Nureyev blinks, “Of course,” he says again. “I’m sorry.” 

“It’s okay. It’s kind of a load off that you know, now. It’s been… sort of really fucking weird having you talk to me like you don’t even know me while I’m… you know.”

“Dying because of me,” something pained flickers across Nureyev’s face, “I hadn't even made that connection until now. I am so sorry. That must be absolutely terrible.”

“It’s—let’s not talk about it,” Juno deflects quickly, “How are you feeling? About this whole… situation?” 

Nureyev is still and silent for a long moment. Finally, he shrugs. “It is what it is, I suppose. I knew I had lost my memories, and while I hadn’t the slightest clue that it might have been memories of  _ you _ that I lost, it’s better that than you having known my name from some other source.”

Juno can tell that that’s not exactly the truth. He can tell it in the way that Nureyev holds himself a little too perfectly, and the look on his face is a little  _ too  _ neutral. He knows what Nureyev looks like when he’s telling the truth. He’s been in his head, momentarily. He knows that the truth is Nureyev’s last defence. 

“Right,” Juno mumbles. “Well, if you ever need to talk about it, I’m here for you. I guess.”

“Thank you. I’ll definitely take you up on that,” Nureyev smiles, and Juno knows in an instant that no matter what happens, Nureyev will definitely not take him up on that.

“Let’s talk more about you,” Nureyev presses gently. “Are there any things I can do to make your situation a little better, Juno? I don’t wish to be making your pain any worse.”

Juno looks at the face of the man he’s in love with. What can Peter Nureyev do to not make his pain any worse? How does Juno even begin to describe that even looking at his face is the worst kind of pain? 

“Maybe, just… um. Don’t flirt with me casually?” Juno laughs slightly. “Like, on the heist back with Zolotovna. That was kind of awful actually.” 

Nureyev seems to go a little pale, “Juno—“

“It’s fine, really. It wasn’t a big deal, and you haven’t done it heaps since. Just something to keep in mind in case Buddy gets it in her head to send us into a heist as a couple again.”

“Right,” Nureyev says. Then he sighs, “This is… a lot to process.”

“Yeah? I thought you were totally fine,” Juno teases, but he lies back on his bed with an accompanying sigh. “It is kind of huge, yeah. Did I jog any of your memories? When I told you about our whole… thing?” 

After a moment’s hesitation, Nureyev lies down beside him. “I don’t think so,” he admits. “When you were explaining it, it seemed to make sense, but perhaps my brain was simply… filling in the blanks based on the story that you were telling me.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Juno says. 

“Juno… can I ask another question?”

“Go ahead,” Juno murmurs. 

“Only, if I told you my name I assume you know that it matters very much to me. Under the same merit, I’d like to know if there’s… anything else about me that you know.”

A flash of a bright red room, an owl-eyed man on the floor. Nureyev’s hands covered in sticky blood.

“You do know something,” Nureyev accuses, and that’s when Juno notices that he’s tense. “Juno, please. It’s very important to me that I know what you know.”

“Fuck,” Juno slaps a hand over his face. “This… isn’t exactly how I wanted to have this conversation with you.”

“Pardon?”

“I know stuff about you that you, like… don’t know that I know? But you knew that I knew something, because you sort of asked me to know more, even if you didn’t exactly know what I would end up knowing?” Juno feels his tongue tangling as he tries to explain it. He’s getting nervous.

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.”

“Trust me, there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to tell you the whole story without giving you some sort of brain fuse shortage,” Juno sighs. “Look. I’ll tell you what I know, just… I’m sorry, in advance? That this is sort of a bad way to tell you.”

“What is it?” there’s a hint of urgency to Nureyev’s voice now, and Juno figures he’s probably already figured out exactly what it is that Juno knows about him.

“I know that you’re from Brahma,” Juno says softly. “And I, uh… know what happened. How you left it. About what happened to… Mag.”

Nureyev flinches at the name and Juno reaches out for him before he can stop himself, protective instinct making him place his hand on Nureyev’s shoulder, “Shit. You okay?”

“I…” Nureyev breathes out a little shakily, and then looks up at Juno. “Yes. Yes, I’m… I…”

He loses focus on Juno’s face again and swallows. Then he clears his throat and sits up, shaking Juno’s hand off of him. “Well! I… hadn’t expected that.”

“Kind of a lot to process, right? Maybe we should stop here. I don’t want to totally overwhelm you.”

“I must have trusted you an awful lot to get the surgery,” Nureyev mutters, almost to himself. 

Juno can’t help himself. “You… what?”

“I must have trusted you,” Nureyev reiterates, and looks back at Juno. He’s searching his face again like he’s looking for the answer to jump out at him. “I can’t believe I just let somebody who knew my name wander away into the galaxy without… leaving some sort of note for myself. Letting me know who it was out there who I had entrusted my deepest secrets to.” 

“You, uh, probably knew I wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway,” Juno jokes half-heartedly, because he really doesn’t want to be hearing that Nureyev trusts him right about now. He doesn’t need another thorn in his side. 

Excuse the pun. 

Nureyev just keeps staring at him for a long while. Then he gets to his feet. “I think I’ll leave you here, Detective Steel. Is it alright with you if I come back to talk with you tomorrow?”

“Yeah, of course,” Juno says, “No problem at all.” 

“Thank you,” Nureyev says.

“Uh—hey,” Juno sits up just before he reaches the door. “Do you… want me to stick to Euanthe when we’re alone? I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, especially if you don’t, like. Want me using that name anymore. The—the other name, I mean.”

Nureyev shrugs slightly, “I suppose I trusted you with it once. I can’t really take that back now, can I? As long as we’re in private, Juno, you can call me what you like.”

And like that, he’s gone. Juno sighs and falls back on the bed again. He spends a moment attempting to figure out how he feels about the conversation they had, but it all feels... blurry, and a little off-key. His heart is still racing and his hands, when he raises them to his chest, tremble shakily. He can only imagine how Nureyev must really be doing.

What a fucking day.


	7. red camellia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is SUCH a chunky chapter (8.5k words) hope you all are prepared to strap in. BUT as a bonus gift, it DOES have a lot of pining and also features Peter Nureyev's Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day.
> 
> CWs: disassociation (panic attack), blood & injuries, sedation (shadows of the ship), discussion of mortality.

Nureyev feels like he only just makes it back to his room without his legs giving out from underneath him. His mind is miles away from his body, running through sets of invisible calculations and trying in vain once again to feel around the gaps in his memories.

Juno Steel. He gave his deepest secrets to  _ Juno Steel  _ in less than twelve hours since meeting him?

The thing is, he can see it. Between what Juno told him before he accidentally slipped out his name, plus what they just talked about in the bedroom, he can see Juno Steel being the sort of person that Peter Nureyev would entrust his secrets to.

And now they’re on the ship together, and Nureyev is watching a man in love with him die because he can’t return his feelings. 

In the hours following, Nureyev paces his room and tries very forcefully to make sense of his thoughts by packaging them into nice, logical, easily digestible facts he can make true if he concentrates on them enough. 

First of all, he decides, he can’t go and get himself entangled in Juno’s future. He can’t for many reasons: firstly, he can’t force himself into feeling something for Juno, and to try would only be leading Juno on, which is absolutely too cruel even by his own standards. Secondly, he can’t deal with shouldering the guilt of Juno’s decision. Juno was offered surgery, for free. He chose not to take it because he assumed he owed Nureyev some sort of suffering debt. That was a decision that Nureyev had no say in, and one that Juno regrets now. It’s not something he can do anything about changing, and not something he can afford to feel guilty about. Thirdly, he needs to make peace with the fact that Juno knows about his past. He can’t do anything about that, either, although he certainly has some very stern words to say with the besotted iteration of his past self that made the stupid decision to entrust Juno with so much. 

The secrets are his and Juno’s alone. And if he makes sure that Juno doesn’t get them out to anybody, then they will stay his and Juno’s. And… if something goes wrong in their journey to retrieve the Curemother prime… then they go back to being just his.

It’s a sickening thing to think about, so Nureyev decides not to. Of course, he’d forgotten. Juno is going to be absolutely fine thanks to their finding the Curemother prime, and then there will be absolutely no reason for him to worry himself sick, or preoccupy himself with some sort of guilt. Those feelings won’t help in getting them to the Curemother prime any faster, and they certainly won’t help make Juno any better. 

It’s these revelations that finally allow him to pack his pesky thoughts away and sit down on the end of his bed, finally stilled both physically and mentally. 

Everything will be fine. He needs to keep friendly with Juno while they get to the Curemother prime, and then they will fix him, and everything will be absolutely fine.

And in the meantime, this does give him the unique opportunity to refill the blanks of his mind. In that sense, meeting Juno here on the ship has almost been a sort of gift. There is, after all, only one person in the entire galaxy who would be able to fill in the exact details of what it is he’s missing from the year he was involved with the detective — and what are the chances of ending up working alongside him?

So that’s the plan: focus on getting back what he can of his memories. Continue to work on his debts on the side. Make sure that Juno lives. An easy plan, surely. 

He stands up and begins to pace the room again.

Luckily, the heist for the blade starts to take up most of his time as it draws closer. It’s a very high-risk operation — as if all of them so far haven’t been high risk — and there’s a good chance that one of them will get hurt if it doesn’t go exactly according to plan. Nureyev is going to make sure that it will go exactly according to plan.

Juno and Vespa seem to have other ideas about that, however, if the meetings they routinely have with Buddy regarding exact specifics of the heist have anything to say about it. They bicker over every single detail, even the ones that shouldn’t have any relevance — how long it should take Nureyev to pick the lock on the door, what colour the alarms will blare when they inevitably trigger them and alert their presence to security. 

It’s exhausting, but it does at least keep his days occupied. At nights after dinner, he and Juno start to meet up to discuss more about the time that they spent together before they developed hanahaki. 

All things considered, and despite the faded edges of the self-deprecating streak Juno hasn’t entirely been able to erase from his speech habits, he makes for very good company. Nureyev makes sure never to overstep — never to touch him, and certainly never to say anything that could be remotely interpreted as flirtatious. 

It’s an arrangement that works, except for one small little problem.

If he’s honest with himself, he noticed it the first night that they spent together after the heist at Ms. Zolotovna’s estate. The first time he recognises it for what it truly is, though, is on the heist for the blade. 

Nureyev’s part of the work goes perfectly to plan, which is fine until it’s entirely irrelevant, because Juno and Vespa’s bickering through the comms delays them enough so that the alarm gets triggered while he and Juno are still inside the facility, rather than midway through their escape. 

“Shit,” Juno says, pulling out his blaster. His eye is sharp, glancing around the room for potential threats. “We should, uh… probably run about this, huh?”

“How perceptive of you, detective,” Nureyev says, and they both take off together.

Juno manages to set up his comms while they run, and the call patches through to Vespa. “The hell are you doing out there, daydreaming?” he barks, “You didn’t think to let us know the alarm was gonna be triggered early?”

“Shut up, Steel!” Vespa sounds murderous, “You don’t know a goddamn thing about what you’re talking about, so just— mind your own business!”

“If I can make a suggestion,” Nureyev calls, a few strides ahead of Juno, “We might leave the finger-pointing until  _ after  _ we’ve made it out of here alive!” 

Juno growls and drops the call, and starts to run in earnest. 

Nureyev doesn’t want to say it, because Juno is probably already thinking it, but they can’t keep this up long without it starting to do damage to Juno’s already failing lungs. They need to get out of here as fast as possible, which is why, of course, that Nureyev is so focused on glancing back to keep an eye on Juno's progress that he turns the corner and doesn’t see the flight of stairs until he’s at the bottom of it. 

“Shit! Nur—Euanthe!” Juno shouts from some indiscernible direction, and suddenly Nureyev can hear what sounds like six sets of footsteps from every direction tumbling down the stairs until there’s suddenly two hands on him.

“Shit,” Juno says, “Shit, shit, shit. Fuck. Okay, so… you aren’t gonna be able to stand.”

“Whyever would that…” Nureyev trails off as he hoists himself up on his elbows and looks at his leg, which definitely shouldn’t be at that angle. “Ah,” he says. “That’s quite a lot of blood.” 

“This is fine,” Juno says, in a voice that is quickly making its way towards hysterical. “Cool! We just gotta… get you out of here, and everything will go totally fine! I’m gonna pick you up.”

“But—” Nureyev starts to object, and then the world spins as Juno lifts him into his arms. He had been about to say something about not being in any sort of pain, but being moved seems to snap his entire body out of shock, and it feels as though his entire body bursts into flame. He can’t muffle the sound that is ripped out of his throat in time, and he hears Juno swear again. 

“Arms around my neck, c’mon,” Juno mutters. He has one arm under Nureyev’s leg, trying to hold it right, and his other arm is under Nureyev’s ass, holding the rest of his body up. It’s a stunning feat of strength, and perhaps Nureyev would pay more attention to it if his vision weren't starting to go funny around the edges.

“Juno,” he says, “I think I may pass out. Nothing to worry about, detective, I’m sure you’re capable of getting the house door open free on time… oh dear.”

“Shhh, shhh,” Juno is running again, and his lips are pressed to Nureyev’s sweaty forehead, “I got you. It’s fine. They haven’t found us, so… all I gotta do is get to the rendezvous point. It’s gonna be alright. I got you.”

Nureyev leans his head against Juno’s shoulder and feels his muscles moving against him as he runs. “I know,” he slurs softly against Juno’s collarbone, as his vision grows dark, “You’ve got me.” 

When he comes to again, it’s a few minutes later as Juno sets him down in the back seat of the Ruby 7. He realises dizzily that he’s been positioned so that Vespa has access to his leg, and his head is in Juno’s lap. He blinks upwards at the underside of Juno’s chin as Juno slams the door shut, and then begins to cough.

He doubles over so far that Nureyev is almost smothered, and he can feel the coughs rattling Juno's entire body. He can hear him wheezing and gasping for breath, and when a spot of something wet hits him square on the forehead he is unsure whether it is a tear, or spit, or… blood from the force of the coughing.

Then Juno leans over to the side of the car and gags, his body shaking as he spits out the full bud of an unformed rose. 

He falls back against the carseat and spends the rest of the ride home gasping shakily for breath. Apart from that, the only sound is Vespa muttering angrily to herself as she deals with Nureyev’s leg. He is too dizzy to think properly before the painkillers she injected him with start to take hold, and the pain starts to drain out of his body.

Then he realises that Juno’s fingers are in his hair, stroking through it softly. 

Juno — who just put his own life and health at risk in more ways than one to carry him to safety — is still thinking about  _ his  _ comfort. About making sure that  _ he’s  _ alright.

And when Nureyev feels the gentle flicker of something alight in his chest, he’s too tired to fight it off. Because Juno is gentle with him, and beautiful, and Nureyev wants to stay in his arms for as long as he can.

He babbles something mostly incoherent along those lines into Juno’s shirt, and passes out again.

He floats in and out of consciousness while Vespa sets the bones and puts him in a cast, and the second time he’s really properly awake is just a few minutes before something hideous and robotic stalks into the room and promptly knocks him out with another dose of some strong sedative. If he had been given the chance, he would probably feel incredibly pissed off about it. As it happens, all he gets are a few seconds of pure terror. 

_ Then  _ he wakes up to the sound of the ship’s alarms blaring. He is lying on the floor with absolutely no idea how he got there, and he thinks he can hear somebody screaming — though that could just be the screech of something against the metal of the ship. 

His first thought is that it’s too soon for Dark Matters to have found them, surely.

His second thought is that this is probably where he dies.

Then the ship crashes violently into a large body of water and he doesn’t think about anything else after that.

All things considered, Nureyev doesn’t think anybody can blame him for waking up on the sandy beach of some unknown planet and keeping his eyes closed and breath held, expecting for a good while that he’s about to be knocked out all over again.

He’s not sure how long he lies like that until he hears Juno shouting, “Euanthe! Euanthe!”

He opens his eyes, looks directly into the bright sun, and hisses, closing them again. For a moment he thinks he’s dizzy enough that he’s seeing triple, but when he sits up and hazards a glance upwards he confirms that there are, in fact, three suns.

“Over here, detective!” he shouts, and hears Juno let out a wheeze of relief.

“Oh thank God,” Juno makes it over to his side. “Hey. You doing alright?”

“Positively peachy, Juno, I just thought it seemed like the right time of year to have an impromptu near-death experience. Yourself?” 

“Yeah, okay, no need to be a smartass about it,” Juno says down at him, “Everyone’s pretty shaken up. The Carte Blanche is totalled, so… we’re probably gonna be stuck here for a while. Vespa was the last to get taken by that… thing that got the rest of us, and she’s sort of the worst off out of everyone. Said she’ll take a look at your cast after she has a bit of a rest, providing I could find you and you hadn’t died, though, so…” 

“My… right,” Nureyev remembers suddenly, and looks down at his leg, which is encased in a flimsy temporary cast. He has always taken care not to allow himself to break a bone. In his profession, being tethered to the ground is a state that is likely to get you killed, and very quickly. 

It should be fine as long as they don’t have to run for their lives on this island, he thinks to himself, and decides absolutely to not think about how likely that scenario is, considered their luck of late. 

“I can, um… help you back to the others, if you want,” Juno reaches a hand down to help him up.

“Ah, yes,” Nureyev smiles, another memory coming to him as he takes Juno’s hand and allows Juno to pull him slowly to his feet. “You did play the role of my dashing saviour back in that facility, now, didn’t you?” 

“Uh—dunno if you can call it that,” Juno mumbles, “I jostled you pretty badly, actually. Vespa says your cast will probably be on for longer because of that, so… you’re welcome, I guess.”

“If you hadn’t carried me out of there, it’s likely I would have a lot more things to worry about than a broken leg, Juno,” Nureyev tries a tentative step on his cast and hisses, falling into Juno’s shoulder.

“Woah, hey, hey. Maybe I should… like, carry you back to the others? I really don’t want you to end up fucking your injury up any more than it already is.”

Nureyev stays leaning against Juno’s shoulder for a moment and breathes out slowly through his nose. As humiliating as it is to be carried like a child, it’s true that a bad enough injury could lead to complications that could seriously damage his potential of continuing his career, or at the very least make him more recognisable. So he nods, “If you would, Juno, I would be very grateful.”

“Alright. Hold on,” Juno says, and then hoists him up in his arms.

Nureyev wraps his arms around Juno’s neck for balance and rests his head against his shoulder. Despite all the time that he has been unconscious over the last twenty four hours, he finds that he’s positively exhausted. He almost falls asleep while Juno carries him back to where the rest of the crew have shacked up.

He’s woken by Rita screaming at the top of her lungs, “Oh my God he’s  _ dead!”  _

_ “ _ He’s not  _ dead _ , Rita,” Juno grumbles, and Nureyev can feel his chest rumble as he deposits him down gently into the sand. “…I think.”

Nureyev blinks his eyes open and sits up, “Afraid you haven’t gotten rid of me that easily. Nobody tell Vespa.”

“Real funny, idiot,” Vespa hisses. She’s standing next to Buddy, holding on tight to her hand like she’s a little scared to be away from her. Nureyev figures they’ve all had a hard enough time recently that making jabs — even friendly ones — is probably not the wisest course of action. He sighs and relaxes back into the sand. 

“We were all rather worried about you, Pete,” Buddy says, “You’re the last to be found — the rest of us landed close together. Juno particularly was in a state.”

“Hey,” Juno’s voice cracks. “You don’t— I don’t— it wasn’t— shut up. You’re not my mom.”

Nureyev tries not to think about that — about Juno being worried on his behalf. The others don’t know what they’re poking fun at him for when they say things like that, but Nureyev does. Juno was stressed because he thought he’d lost someone he… 

If there was some magical way he could lift Juno from the curse of being in love with him, Nureyev would. He probably could, if he poured his heart into it, but it would involve being incredibly cruel, and with no certainty of its success in actually  _ doing something  _ about the disease he’s afflicted with, it’s beyond even Nureyev’s moral limits. 

It just doesn’t seem to make any sense: Juno has seen Nureyev’s past, has seen into his mind. How can someone as strong, as gifted, as smart and as handsome as Juno Steel be stuck in love with a murderous thief six feet under in debt? 

“—think it’s time we all took stock of our situation,” Buddy is saying when Nureyev realises that she is speaking. “We may not have much, but we have each other, and I firmly believe that as long as we stick together and work at our roles, we’ll get the Carte Blanche up and running again.” 

“And my role?” Nureyev asks, from the sand, and Buddy looks down at him.

“Sit there and look pretty, Hiko. As far as I can tell, you’re very good at doing just that.” 

So Nureyev gets confined to his quarters while the others get set up with extremely important jobs to work towards getting the Carte Blanche running. At first, it’s only humiliating — but the need to sleep and Vespa’s insistence that he rests catches up to him, and so it’s fine. 

After a few days, things start to change, and Nureyev can feel his skin beginning to crawl whenever he’s left alone. 

Left alone, there are a lot of terrible things on his mind. First of all, this hasn’t stopped being any less humiliating — the rest of the crew, these legends in crime he’d dreamed of being able to work with one day — all have their vital jobs to do while he sits around being exactly the nuisance Vespa regularly accuses him of being (when she’s taking a break from accusing him of actively being their enemy). 

He also has plenty of time to ruminate on his debts, and plenty of reminders as to why exactly he should be doing so. The comms he keeps separate to deal with his personal affairs gets a call within a day, and even though Nureyev can’t reach it from where he’s confined to bed rest, he knows who it is and why they are calling. He has missed a progress report.

When he gets close enough to a person to ask them to pass him his bag, he sees what Dark Matters have to say to him, and it’s not any better at calming his nerves. He was supposed to have aided with the drone that they sent on the ship -- when they found him incapacitated in the Medbay, they weren’t exactly pleased. He has to think of some sort of plan to make it up to them, and quickly. One that doesn’t put the rest of the crew in danger.

Nureyev’s mind churns around that little chestnut every second he has spare. He has to try to convince Dark Matters that given a little more time, he will possess some items that can lead them to one of the biggest secrets of the millennium. The question is how he can navigate around them so that he can convince them that the Aurinkos aren’t worth apprehending. He will have to plan it  _ incredibly  _ well in order to run it past them.

Then there’s always the issue of getting the items to them after this is all over. He supposes that the best he can do is slip out from under the noses of the crew while they are high off their celebration of the theft of the Curemother prime. They probably won’t notice him go, and if Juno is cured by that time then he will be healthy enough to move on to somebody else.

Another thing that Nureyev finds his thoughts caught on a lot of the time is Juno.

Mostly, this is because Juno is the only person who actually bothers to come in and check on him, apart from the occasional fly-in fly-out sessions he gets with Rita, who similarly has not been given a job and is driven to tears with boredom much as he is. And the thing is… the problem he had identified back when Juno had carried him out of the facility after he had broken his leg, and one he had wishfully blamed on pain-induced delirium… it hasn’t gone away.

As if he can read his thoughts, Nureyev hears the solid three taps of Juno’s knock on his door. 

“Come in, come in,” Nureyev says.

Juno pulls open the door and steps inside. “Euanthe,” he says softly. “Hey. How are you, um… doing?”

“Oh, perfectly fine,” Nureyev lies through his teeth, “Your Rita set me up with almost unlimited access to this thrilling compilation of old Earth texts, and I have been thoroughly enjoying reading them. I’ve stumbled upon a series about a detective, you know.” 

“Is that so?” Juno asks, and pulls out the chair beside Nureyev’s bed to sit down in it. “Is it any good?”

Nureyev shrugs, “This detective is not nearly as good company as the one I find myself in the company of now,” he says, and sets his comms aside, locking the screen so that Juno can’t see that it wasn’t open to the page of a book at all.

Juno gives him half a laugh for his compliment, and sits back in his chair. He’s wearing just a simple cotton top and a skirt — it is hot out on the beach without the shelter that the Carte Blanche provides Nureyev, and the few times he has been outside he has been made glad for once that he isn’t actually set up with doing tasks to help the crew.

“How goes it out there?” Nureyev tilts his head towards the general direction of the beach, and Juno shrugs.

“It’s alright. Got nothing to do at the moment. Finished up helping Vespa re-pack all the supplies in the Medbay, sort of stood by and did not much while Jet tinkered with some stuff down in the engine room. Trying to un-beat the shit out of the front of the ship. You know. Normal stuff, I guess.” 

“It sounds very exciting. How I envy you all. Have you explored much of the island?”

“A little,” Juno says. He shrugs, and glances away towards the wall. “I, um… was actually gonna ask you if you wanted to take a walk tonight.”

Nureyev blinks. “A walk?”

“Yeah,” Juno looks down at the space between his feet, “You haven’t seen much of this island, and it’s really pretty at sunset, and we, uh… haven’t really had the privacy to have a chat in a while. I guess I figured we should catch up a little, keep talking over our histories, and stuff.”

Nureyev stares at Juno.  It’s a hard thing to say yes to without knowing Juno’s full intentions. The last thing Nureyev wants, he’s decided, is to accidentally make Juno fall even harder for him. If spending time one on one together is going to do that — if it makes his disease even worse and ruins his chances of survival — he’s not sure that he can live with that.

“Are you… sure?” Nureyev settles on asking. 

“I think it would be nice,” Juno says. “I haven’t—um. Spent time with a friend in a bit. Rita’s sort of busy with Jet tonight and I… I’m not really in the mood for being talked at super loud and for ages, anyway? Rita’s great, and I… she means a lot to me, but sometimes I just want… someone I can just hang with, I guess.”

“Oh,” Nureyev says. He pauses, “You might have to carry me. I’m not sure exactly how fun that would be.”

Juno shrugs, “Vespa says your leg’s healing up pretty nicely though, right? I’m sure if you lean on me it’ll be no big deal. We’re set to get off this island in like a week if everything keeps going to plan. It would suck if you didn’t get the chance to see as much as possible of it by the time we take off.”

“I… right,” Nureyev says, “Well. That sounds lovely, Juno.”

Juno smiles, “We can go after dinner if you want? I think Jet’s cooking tonight.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Nureyev says, and Juno stands up and leaves him there. 

The problem with Juno is that he’s very beautiful, and the more time Nureyev spends with him, the more a terrible awful truth starts to raise its head in his heart: he thinks there may be every chance that he has caught feelings for the detective.

Nureyev had made a promise to himself that he wouldn’t get in the way of what Juno was feeling for him, and that it would be intensely cruel to pretend that he was having feelings for him or to give him hope to believe there was any chance that Nureyev might fall for him. Now it is starting to occur to him that there’s every chance that those feelings may be becoming a reality, whether he likes it or not. 

What is he to do about that? Should he lean into the feelings and see if they develop? Nureyev has never been one to catch feelings easily, but once he does he often falls quickly. There is every chance that they may be able to get out of this situation once and for all without having to rely on the Curemother prime. 

But he can’t force it. He doesn’t know how to develop those feelings without spending more time with Juno, and he doesn’t know how to spend more time with Juno without inadvertently leading him on in one way or another. And if he can’t make those feelings develop, or if Juno refuses to believe that they are genuine, then all he’s doing is being cruel in the exact way he promised himself he wouldn’t be.

Nureyev sighs and resolves to just let things be as they may. He cannot concern himself with being worried about this situation right now. Surely in time the right course of action will present itself to him.

Vespa comes in to deposit a plate of food into Nureyev’s lap, glaring at him all the way, and after he finishes eating, he sets the plate aside for it to be collected later. Juno comes and gets him after he has finished his dinner, and helps him out of bed. It’s the first time Nureyev has actually stood in several days, and the sensation is a little disconcerting.

“Hey, hey, you’re not gonna fall over on me, are you?” Juno teases, holding tight onto his side. “Not the time to be falling into my arms, Nureyev, read the room.”

“Very funny,” Nureyev mumbles. He lets Juno help him out of the room and down the hall of the Carte Blanche until they emerge under the starry sky of the planet they’ve found themselves trapped on. What the planet makes up for in suns, it loses in moons — which is to say that there isn’t one. Still, there are enough stars in this particular arm of the galaxy to light the night sky up with a gentle blue-purple light. It spills out over the sand, and gives it something of a magical look. 

“It’s pretty,” Nureyev says quietly. 

Juno looks out as though he’s seeing it for the first time. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.” 

Jet and Rita are sitting at a fire that they’ve built. Juno helps Nureyev sit down beside them, and then sits down himself. “What’s going on, guys?”

“Mista Jet was just tellin’ me about all the constellations around here Mista Steel!” Rita chirps happily, “There’s all kinds of cool constellations! And I invented a new one!”

“You can’t just  _ invent  _ a new constellation, Rita,” Juno says.

“Oh really? And how did the constellations we already have get invented in the first place, huh, boss? Magic? Did somebody give a buncha people a license to name the stars? I don’t think so!”

“Not your boss,” Juno says, and Rita shrugs like it doesn’t really matter.

“How are you doing Mista Euanthe?” Rita turns to Nureyev. “Do you want any marshmallows? Mista Jet found a bag in the back of the Calf Blank’s kitchen and now we’re having s’mores!” she waves a stick in his face, the end of which is covered in some sort of white, sticky puffball.

“Thank you, Rita, but I’m trying to watch my figure,” Nureyev pats his stomach, and beside him, Juno snorts. 

“Won’t be a figure left to watch if you get any skinnier, Euanthe. A couple of marshmallows won’t hurt you. Pass a stick here, Rita,” he makes grabby hands out to her and she lights up.

“ _ Yes!  _ Now we’re talking, Mista Steel! Here, you take this one,” she reaches behind the log she’s sitting on and pulls out a long stick with two branches like a fork on the end. Then she reaches into a plastic bag beside her and pulls out two of the puffballs, one pink and one white. She starts to twist them onto the end of the stick.

“What… are they?” Nureyev asks, and Rita’s little mouth drops all the way open.

“Oh. My. God, Mista Euanthe! You’re kidding! Please tell me you’re kidding! That’s just the saddest thing I ever heard! Somebody who ain’t ever even had marshmallows!”

Rita looks genuinely like she might be able to cry, and before Nureyev can come to his own defence, Juno steps in.

“Yeah, well, we’re about to fix that, aren’t we?” he reaches out across the fire and takes the stick from Rita’s hand. Then he puts the two ends of the stick that the puffballs are impaled on directly into the flame.

“Are they safe to eat raw?” Nureyev asks, and Juno laughs at him.

“Yeah, Euanthe, they’re just a snack. They’re just way better roasted. Ain’t that right, Rita?”

“Honestly it should be a crime to eat em if they ain’t been fried, Mista Steel,” she agrees sombrely. “Or dunked in some kinda hot drink.”

“Yeah, that’s the bit that gets me. Nobody’s ever put a marshmallow in your drink before?” Juno turns to raise an eyebrow at him.

The flickering firelight plays across his face in a way that’s incredibly flattering. The shadows and light dance across the bump of his nose, highlight his lips. The flame itself reflects in his eye, and it reminds Nureyev of the fiery boldness he’d seen in Juno earlier that had made him so enamoured with him in the first place. 

Nureyev shakes his head, a little dazedly. 

“Shame. I’ll have to make you a hot chocolate sometime,” Juno says, and then Rita screeches. 

Nureyev jumps and looks back at the fire, where he sees that their marshmallows have caught alight in the flame. Juno rolls his eye and pulls them out, blowing on them to put out the flame.

“Chill out, Rita. That’s just how you know that they’re done,” he says.

“Mista Steel I  _ really  _ think that ain’t how it works—”

“They taste better burnt on the outside,” Juno says to Nureyev, showing off the brown-black crust on the outside of the marshmallows. “The absolute perfect ‘mallow is one that’s crunchy on the outside and nice and melted on the inside. Trust me. Best thing you’ve ever tasted.” 

“It's okay, Mista Steel, you can't always be right about everything,” Rita mutters, and starts twisting another marshmallow onto her stick. 

“I also do not eat my marshmallows this way,” Jet says seriously.

“Hey, thanks, Big Guy. Really needed your input on this, I’m totally sure that Euanthe will trust me now. Look, they’re good, alright? Watch.” 

Juno tips his head back and holds one fork of the stick over his mouth. The marshmallow on the end of it begins to stretch out, half-melted as it is, and then it plops into his open mouth, dragging lines of melted, sugary substance between the stick and his lips. His tongue darts out to catch what’s left.

Nureyev watches. Intently.

“See?” Juno crunches down on the skin of the marshmallow in his mouth, and passes the stick to Nureyev. “It’s like, a Juno Steel staple food item. I used to stick marshmallows on chopsticks and hold them over the toaster until they cooked. One time when I was eleven I set off the fire alarm at like, 3am, because I hadn’t eaten like all day so I raided the cupboard for marshmallows, and I hadn’t considered that maybe repeatedly turning on the toaster with nothing but old crumbs in it was not a  _ great  _ idea?”

“That sounds… inadvisable, yes,” Nureyev says.

“Yeah. Ma was pretty mad. Like. A lot mad, actually.” 

Something heavy settles over Juno’s features then, and Nureyev is struck by the desire to ask him what he means by that. There is so much depth to Juno Steel. He is somebody who has seen all sorts of the experiences life can offer, and Nureyev knows that — he can tell, just be seeing the scars on his face, the experience and worldliness he wears in the lines of his skin, the weight of his words. Nureyev wants to keep him up late at night, asking him what he’s seen. He imagines Juno has stories that would chill Nureyev to his core. He wants to hear them all. He wants to gather them up in his heart and keep them safe so that Juno doesn’t have to carry them alone, anymore. 

The marshmallow falls off the stick and into the sand. Juno’s shoulders slump, “Are you fucking kidding me, Euanthe?” 

Nureyev blinks, a little embarrassed at having been caught staring. He sheepishly hands the stick back into Juno’s hands, “I don’t suppose you’d mind a repeat demonstration?”

Juno rolls his eye and throws the stick to Rita, “Alright. Two more marshmallows.”

“Yes, boss!” Rita says, with her mouth full. Nureyev narrows his eyes at her.

“I thought you said they aren’t worth eating raw,” he says.

“Well, sometimes a gal gets impatient!” Rita says through her full mouth. “You can’t blame her for that, can you?” 

Juno cooks them another two marshmallows, and Nureyev discovers that Juno and Rita were not exaggerating when they called the treat one of the best things available to eat. He scarfs down a few, and they keep cooking more until the plastic bag is empty and the air smells sickly sweet with cooked sugar. Even Jet gets melted marshmallow fluff in his beard. 

“Where were these in the Outer Rim?” Nureyev mutters to himself, staring at the stick in his hands and wondering if it would be socially acceptable for him to try and lick it clean. 

“Benefit of being born a Solar baby,” Juno shrugs.

“The one benefit?” Nureyev raises an eyebrow, “Marshmallows? Not growing up somewhere where more than half of the population has electricity, fewer people are in abject poverty, there are no oppressive government regimes—”

“I thought you was from Saturn, Mista Euanthe,” Rita pipes up, and Nureyev goes quiet very fast.

Oh.

He stalls for a moment, and in that time Juno has already started speaking. “His parents are from Shiva. Sure you pretty much grew up on Outer Rim cuisine, huh? Probably heard some horror stories of life out there, too.”

Relief floods Nureyev’s body. “Yes,” he agrees, “We visited a few times in my youth, during school holidays and such. There’s a lot I learned about life on the Outer Rim from my parents.”

Juno smiles at Nureyev. It’s a small, soft thing, and a little mischievous. It’s just for him: a little nod to the joke they’re both in on. 

Nureyev’s never had somebody cover for him like that before. To be fair, that’s largely because he’s never been stupid enough to let something that personal slip before — or at least, not to somebody he hasn’t planned on swiftly disposing of afterwards anyway. 

Nureyev smiles back.

Jet yawns. “I think I will go to bed,” he says, “It is past my bedtime, and I am tired from all the work I have done today.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Rita says, “I’m real tired from all the stream watching I did today. That sorta stuff can really tire a girl out! Plus I gotta be up at 3am if I wanna catch the latest episode of  _ Pluto’s Messiest House Husbands _ — Mista Steel, did I tell you about what happened last episode on that one? It was so shocking!”

“Uh— sounds cool, Rita,” Juno interjects before Rita can fully get started on one of her rants, “I will definitely have to catch up with it sometime.”

“Right! Right, so like I was saying, I really should be getting to bed really soon and maybe not coming back outside again for the rest of the night for sure,” Rita says very quickly, and now she’s looking Juno right in the face.

Juno, for his part, looks entirely unimpressed, “Goodnight, Rita.”

“Okay, Mista Steel. Goodnight. Boy, it sure is romantic out here, ain’t it? You know, if I was waiting to make some sort of a move of some kind—” her eyes slide over to look at Nureyev as she continues, and Nureyev feels suddenly as though he is a bug pinned to a card in a museum display. It hits him with certainty: she knows. Of course she does. She probably even recognises him from when he and Juno worked together all that time ago. She’s known this whole time.

“ _ Goodnight _ , Rita,” Juno growls, and Rita glares at him.

“Alright, alright, I’m going! Sheesh!” Rita stands up and starts picking up all the rubbish from her marshmallow snacks, “Night Mista Steel. Mista Euanthe.”

“Goodnight, Rita,” Nureyev says, and she and Jet disappear together into the belly of the Care Blanche.

“I, uh…” Juno says awkwardly. “Sorry. About her.”

“She knows,” Nureyev says, and watches Juno’s face form into a cringe.

“Yeah. You have no idea how hard I had to work to convince her not to say anything stupid to you before now. She’s been dying to get all in our business, figure out what’s going on, like she thinks…” 

“Like… she thinks I’ll fall in love with you again,” Nureyev says quietly.

Juno says nothing to that for a long moment. He stares into the fire, the flames of which are slowly beginning to die down. Then he snaps his marshmallow stick in two and throws it onto the flame. 

“I’m sorry,” Nureyev says, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s fine,” Juno says roughly. “Not anything you can do about it. Just… sorry things are so awkward. I don’t want you to feel… I dunno. Pressured.”

“I’m not,” Nureyev says sincerely. He hesitates a moment, and then reaches out to take Juno’s hand. “I’m sorry. This must be very hard for you.”

Juno closes his eye and sighs. He wavers for a moment, seemingly indecisive, before he leans his head on Nureyev’s shoulder.

“There are probably better ways it could’ve gone, yeah,” he says. “None of this is fun.”

“Would it help if I leave?” Nureyev asks.

“No,” Juno says quickly. “No. I want you to stay.” 

“Okay,” Nureyev says.

There’s silence for a while apart from the crackling of the fire. The wood shifts, and a little volcano of sparks gets thrown up into the air before settling back in a downpour of glowing orange confetti. 

“Thank you for covering for me when Rita asked about my home planet,” Nureyev says at last. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, I did. I know what it means to you,” Juno squeezes his hand. “It’s not a problem. Actually… I never got to hear much about what your childhood was like.”

Nureyev laughs softly, “That’s probably for the best. There’s not much to show for it.”

“Yeah. I know that feeling,” Juno mutters. 

There is a sort of camaraderie in hurt. Being able to feel it on others. Nureyev can sense that Juno is as much a person built around a soft, hurting core as he is. Likely because Juno seems to have begun the work of peeling away the fortress keeping his insecurities hidden away from the public eye. 

Nureyev trusted him once before with his deepest secrets. He likely could again. He wants to, badly. 

“How are you doing?” he asks instead, trying to pull himself out of his thoughts.

Juno shrugs. “Alright, I guess. I mean, it’s a beautiful night to be dying on. Nice view.”

Nureyev isn’t sure what to say to that. He never is when Juno brings up his mortality. 

“I’m glad that I got to… I dunno. Experience some new things before everything goes to hell,” Juno says. He cranes his neck back to look up at the stars hanging above them. “If all of this hadn’t happened to me, I probably would’ve spent the rest of my sorry life on Mars, you know? I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Like, if I would give up what I’ve experienced over the last few months just to live longer. I dunno.”

This is exactly the sort of thing that Nureyev means. Juno Steel might at first glance seem like a tough lady, jaded by the things he has experienced in the world. But spend a little time with him, catch him in a moment like this — lit softly by the faint orange glow of the fire, and the soft blue glow of the stars above, caught in a reflection in more ways than one…

He has a beautiful mind. A soft heart. Nureyev can’t help but be enamoured by it. 

“And wha do you think about that?” Nureyev asks, “If you could go back and make the choice again… would you make the same one?”

“I dunno,” Juno says quietly. “I dunno.”

Nureyev pulls his eyes away from Juno and looks up at the stars as well. He can feel the heat of Juno’s body beside him. 

“Would you?” Juno asks. 

Nureyev blinks. The question has never crossed his mind before. “I don’t think I would have a choice,” he says. “The situation I’m in… it’s not one I chose because I wanted to be in it. Perhaps I regret it, but… without having had the surgery at the time that I had it, who knows where I would be now? In an even worse situation, I presume.”

Juno looks at him, “What do you mean? You’re in a bad situation?” 

There’s something in his voice that’s almost protective. Even though he hasn’t yet offered, Nureyev can hear in the rough forcefulness of his voice that there’s a promise in it to try to help, to keep Nureyev safe. 

“It’s… not important,” Nureyev brushes it off, and looks back up at the sky.

“I’ve been wondering how you got the money for the surgery,” Juno says cautiously, and Nureyev tenses. Trust the private eye to put together the clues he’s buried away so neatly. “I couldn’t afford the surgery even with all the money Rita put away over the years so I wouldn’t spend it in stupid ways.” 

Nureyev looks down to see that Juno’s eye hasn’t left his. There’s something forceful in it, and not for the first time tonight, Nureyev feels uniquely pinned to the spot. 

“I dunno what’s going on for you,” Juno says evenly, “but if there was something… something you needed help with, I want you to know there are people on this ship who would help you.” 

“I—”

“Even if I can’t do anything, or if… if I die before I can. Rita trusts me, and I trust you, so… she would help you. She’s probably way more helpful than I am anyway.”

“Juno—”

“I know you probably wouldn’t admit anything to me even if I asked you straight up,” Juno looks away from him at last, “But I at least want you to know there are ways out of whatever you’ve dug yourself into. You don’t have to face shit alone.”

Nureyev feels a little like he’s been scooped out — hollow and raw. He knows he shared a lot with Juno back in the day, but he only knows about it anecdotally, from what Juno has told him. It’s… strange to see how it influences the way that Juno interacts with him when he can’t remember it happening in the first place. 

It’s uncomfortable having the attention on him. Nureyev redirects the conversation. “Well,” he says, “I hope you know that the offer extends both ways, Juno. If you’re ever having a hard time dealing with the situation that I— that we— put each other in, I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk about it just because I happen to be— intimately involved in the situation.” 

Juno laughs softly, “Yeah. Right. I’ll, uh… take you up on that, maybe. It’s different for me, though. I have Rita, and Vespa to chat about my options with, and… Buddy is pretty good at helping me deal with the sort of… confronting my own death situation. You have all those people too, but, I’m gonna guess you’re not exactly keen on the idea of actually approaching them about what’s going on. Which I have some thoughts about, but hey, glass houses and stones, I guess.”

“Hm,” Nureyev agrees wordlessly. He sighs and leans back on his arms, “I suppose I should make some effort towards getting some rest. As should you.”

If Juno is offended by the sudden turn in conversation, he doesn't show it other than through a small sigh. “I guess. Thanks, um. For keeping me company. I appreciate it.”

“The thanks extends both ways,” Nureyev says, “There aren’t many people in the galaxy who would willingly give up their time to spend with a broken-legged thief.”

Juno snorts, “Yeah, well. Then most people in the galaxy are stupid. Let me help you get back to your bed.” 

Juno stands up and helps pull Nureyev to his feet. Nureyev spares one last glance around at the evening sky, and something occurs to him.

“I think… Juno,” he says, and Juno stops walking.

“Yeah?”

“Perhaps… could you leave me out here? I think I’d like to watch the sunrise.”

Juno looks a little strangely at him. “Uh. Yeah, sure. Do you want… company?”

Nureyev shakes his head, “I think I’d like a moment to myself, if that’s alright.”

“Okay,” Juno says. “You gonna be able to get yourself back to your room whenever you’re done?”

“Yes, thank you. I’ll be alright, Juno,” Nureyev says.

Juno disappears back into the belly of the Carte Blanche, and Nureyev is left propped up against the outside of the door, staring out at the stretch of beach and the ocean waves lapping up against it. 

It’s a peaceful view. The ocean is mostly flat on this planet, without a moon to control its tides — it's more like a particularly large lake, in that respect — and the stars reflect like millions of pinpricks of light on the surface. Nureyev watches their reflection in the water, slowly moving to an unpredictable rhythm, a sway of time and space. 

The marvel of space is in its infinite nature. It is one of the things that has always spurred on Nureyev’s curiosity about the galaxy, his fascination with the expanse of the universe and each of the planets within it: the impossibility of each moment.

To say that Nureyev believes in something like  _ fate _ is not true. But he is a thief, and thieves are opportunistic. And to be opportunistic is to believe in a certain kind of fate: the fate of coincidence. The desire to catch each possibility in your hands and stretch it out to its limitations, to believe that every one of those possibilities has arisen just for you to take it. 

Nureyev wonders how that philosophy of life fits into the situation he’s found himself in at the moment. It’s true that the chance of finding himself locked in close quarters with the man he gave hanahaki disease to all that time ago is as impossible as this star-filled sky, as uniquely singular as their having crashed on this particular beach in this particular corner of the galaxy. And with it, an opportunity has arisen: give in to the way Juno Steel is beginning to make him feel. Foster the emotion, breed it into something that could blossom — excuse the choice in word — into something worth keeping. Something life-saving. 

He would be a bad thief to let an opportunity slide him by without seizing it with both hands.

Nureyev slides down the metal side of the Carte Blanche until he is sitting on the sand. He will likely get that sand deep into his cast, and it’ll make his leg insufferably itchy, but it’s nice being outside for once. Letting his thoughts settle in his mind like the water has settled on this planet. 

A few hours later, just as Nureyev is beginning to doze off in the sand, a sound like the roaring of an engine startles him to life. He looks for the source of the sound to see what looks like a trail of fire and smoke rocketing off into the far reaches of space. It comes from where the Dark Matters drone that had infiltrated their ship had landed in the crash.

Nureyev blinks at the fading trail of smoke in the sky. 

He should probably tell somebody about this. 


	8. primrose

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs: mortality discussed heavily, sexual references

After everything that happens with almost being stuck inside a robot body for, like, the rest of his life -- which is admittedly not that long -- Juno is pretty happy that the next heist they have to do is a long way away. They have to figure out exactly how they’re going to get their hands on the Curemother prime now that they have each of the four items and the approximate location of the facility that it’s supposedly being held in. 

There’s a problem in the way, though, one that becomes more obvious the more time stretches on before their heist. 

One morning, Juno sleeps in too late to catch the family meeting of the day. It’s not weird that he’s slept in — these days he’s doing a lot of that, he’s more tired than usual — but it  _ is  _ weird that nobody came to wake him up or check on him. 

Juno peels himself out of bed and starts heading towards the kitchen. He doesn’t pass anybody on the way there, which is his second clue that something isn’t quite right. He’s about to call out for Rita when he hears voices coming from the kitchen. 

Juno almost crosses the threshold when he hears Vespa’s voice.

“—just saying, we should be prepared for the worst.”

“And… you’re certain, then,” Nureyev speaks. He sounds unusually flat, his tone sombre and melancholy.

“At the rate his disease is progressing, the medication he’s on isn’t going to be able to slow it down enough,” Vespa says. “And thanks to our delay on that island, by the time we figure out how to actually use the Curemother prime…”

A hushed silence falls on the table.

“Have you told him this?” Nureyev asks, and Vespa hesitates. 

“Not yet,” she says. “I wanted to give you all a chance to get used to the idea, so that we can be there to support him when we do have to let him know. I’m… waiting for the right time to say something about it.” 

Silence again. Buddy clears her throat, “Well. I suppose there’s not much that we can do on the matter, then. We’ll simply have to be there for him for as long as he needs us. Vespa, your medical work has been the best that it could possibly be. You’ve done everything you can.”

“Yeah,” Vespa doesn’t sound like she believes it. “I’ll keep doing what I can, too. The death from this sort of disease isn’t… it isn’t nice. We just gotta make sure it’s… as comfortable as we can make it.”

“And… I’m assuming you’ve let Rita know?” Nureyev asks.

“I let her know separately,” Vespa confirms. “I… figured it would hit her the hardest. I wanted her to have a chance to process the news by herself.” 

“Should we delay the mission?” Buddy asks.

“I don’t know. That’s, uh… sort of your call, Bud. The timeline’s gonna be pretty close. But by the time we get there, he’s not gonna be making it out of bed anymore. We at least have to prepare to have the heist with one less person…” 

Juno steps away from the door and into the hallway. He can taste bile in the back of his throat, and his vision is spinning. He stumbles down back towards his bedroom, and hears the scraping of chairs from somewhere behind him. Then footsteps, then an arm at his side.

“Juno,” Nureyev says, “Are you— how much did you—”

“I… I gotta…” words feel weird in Juno’s mouth. He tries to form a sentence, and fumbles around his tongue. Things feel wrong. “Siddown.”

“Of course,” Nureyev says, “I’ll lead you to a chair. Come on, lean on me now, there you go…” 

Nureyev gets him to the living room and sits him down on the sofa. The second Juno sits down he begins to cough, and he doubles over. He can hear footsteps coming into the room after him, and when the fit of coughing finally releases its grip on him, he looks up to see that the rest of his family, minus Rita, are circled around him.

He always kind of knew there was no way he was gonna get to the Curemother prime before this disease got the best of him. That was what he’d been working on with Buddy, after all, right? Confronting his mortality. Making peace with his situation. The whole speech he’d given Nureyev about being glad that he got this experience rather than spending the rest of his life out in Hyperion City. 

But it’s one thing to have those thoughts and those conversations and another entirely to hear your family discussing goddamn funeral plans from the other room. 

“Hey,” Vespa kneels down on the floor in front of him, putting a hand on his shoulder, “Steel, look at me. You doing alright in there?”

Juno lets out a watery laugh, “Yeah, just fucking fine, Vespa. Thanks for asking.”

“Okay, stupid question,” Vespa says, and turns to Jet, “Siquliak. Go get a glass of water. Need to make sure he’s not gonna go into shock.”

“I’m fine,” Juno wrestles himself out of her grip and leans back on the couch, “It’s fine, Vespa. This was always how it was gonna end. I knew it from the start.” 

Nobody has anything to say to that. They all stare at him with tight, serious expressions, and Juno feels their pity crawl over his skin. He stands up from the couch, “Goddamn, would it kill you guys not to look at a lady like you’re expecting him to drop dead right in front of you all?”

“I’m sorry, Juno,” Buddy says. “Would you like some time alone?” 

Time alone is absolutely not what Juno can handle right now. But he’s also not sure he can handle being followed around by four mourners. “I’m fine. It’s fine. Let’s just— can we not… let’s just focus on something else. Please?” 

He turns his back to them so he doesn’t have to see the looks they give each other. Buddy steps close to him and puts a hand on his shoulder that he quickly shakes off. 

“Juno,” she says, “If you need to talk about it—”

“Can we  _ please  _ change the goddamn subject?” he snaps, and turns around again to glare at them all.

Nureyev steps closer, “Of course, detective,” he says softly. “How do you feel about a game of poker, hm? We could get everybody involved. Or we can just watch a stream.”

Juno doesn’t want to play cards. He doesn’t want to watch a stupid movie, either. He wants to scream. He wants to run away from his lungs and from Peter Nureyev and from his own goddamn mind if he can. But he can’t. So he breathes in evenly and says, “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good, Euanthe. Thanks.”

“It’s… not a problem,” Nureyev says, with worried eyes.

Jet walks back in with a glass of water and Juno takes it wordlessly. The rest of the family clear space aside, and they get started on a poker game. 

Juno’s not really in the room for most of it. He feels like he’s somewhere miles above his body, watching himself make the moves from some distance. The others keep giving him searching looks, and Juno tries to ignore them. He refuses to become the pity object of the evening. 

After a while, he starts to float back down into his body. A little while after that, and the only thing he feels about his situation is a deep heaviness down in his gut.

Honestly, maybe it sort of is his time. Juno Steel spent thirty years wishing he was dead, and it was always bound to catch up with him one day. One way or another. 

At least he got to be here for the end of it. Dying has never really scared him. Doesn’t mean he’s really prepared for it, though. Guess nobody ever is. 

He wins the poker game, at least. Focus on the positives, and all that. 

He doesn’t want to go talk to Rita. He has a feeling she won’t be in a good way, and he’s not sure he can… deal with that, right now. He doesn’t want to see what he’s doing to her, what his stupid mistakes have done to her. Losing Benten was the most painful thing to happen to him in his life, and he’s known Rita for longer than he ever knew Benzaiten, at this point. 

Which is an uncomfortable thing to think about, but it’s true. Benzaiten was nineteen when he died, and he’s known Rita for… coming up on twenty one years. 

He doesn’t really want to talk to Nureyev either. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone. After the game ends, Vespa asks him to come by the medbay, and so he does.

The scan of his lungs she takes shows him just how fucked up his whole system is. 

“I guess you probably don’t wanna hear about it,” she says. “I wouldn’t either, if I were you. Doesn’t make any difference in the end.”

“So what do we do, doc?” Juno asks.

“I’m gonna start having you sleep with oxygen,” Vespa putters around the med bay. “Make sure you don’t choke on petals in your sleep. Apart from that… it’s just a waiting game at this point. I’m sorry, Steel.” 

Juno shrugs, “Like Buddy said, V, you’ve done what you can. Not much you can do to stop a literal terminal illness in its tracks.” 

“Yeah. I guess,” Vespa says, but she doesn’t sound comforted much. 

That’s probably the worst part of all of this, to be honest. Juno’s never been scared of dying. But one of the big things driving him back when he used to give up on all of his relationships before they even had a chance to get started was the knowledge that he’d probably die in some horrible way some day. Better to make sure there’s nobody around to mourn you after you’re gone. The last thing he ever wanted to do was leave a wake after his death. 

Back in the Kanagawa mansion, once upon a time, Rex Glass had asked Juno how he would like to die. His reply — a cold ditch — had been less of a joke than Rex had taken it to be. If he could die his way, it would be silently. Simple. Another nameless flickering light extinguished in the sea of billions of nameless flickering lights, replaced immediately by new ones that burn stronger, brighter, better than he ever could have. 

Well. He doesn’t get what he wants. And that question comes back to the forefront of his mind: is it worth it? The relationships he’s made on this ship — have they been worth it? Has he done enough for these people that the good memories they have with him will outweigh the pain he’s going to cause them by dropping off the plane of consciousness?

He hopes so. He really fucking hopes so. 

He thinks on that more, while Vespa finishes poking and prodding at him, and makes up his mind. Everyone on this ship has to go through some of the most challenging things of their lives over the next few weeks -- his death not even the least of them. If there’s anything he wants to do with the last of his time, it’s give them something to look back on. Make them think he was at least happy with how things turned out in the end.

And if that’s not exactly true, it won’t matter eventually. The why dies with him.

A full body shiver runs through him at that thought, earning him a look from Vespa, and then she clears him to go stumble back out into the main body of the Carte Blanche.

He can’t face Rita right now. He just can’t. So he goes to try and create some good memories with the person next most in need of them.

* * *

Nureyev is sitting in the common room when Juno walks through the door. A hesitant glance reveals that he looks ashy and his face is drawn, though whether that’s due to his sickness or his emotional state, Nureyev isn’t sure. He doesn’t often look well, these days. Nureyev keeps his focus on the schematics in front of him, not wanting to put Juno on the spot with an attempt at conversation.

But then, as he is wont to do, Juno surprises him. “Hey,” he leans on the bench beside him, shining a flickering smile in his direction. “I ever tell you which of your aliases was my favourite?”

Nureyev blinks. “No,” he says. “I don’t recall that you have.”

Juno's smile turns mischievous. “Let’s pour ourselves a drink and chat, then.”

“Are you sure alcohol is a good idea?” Nureyev asks, twisting in his seat to follow as Juno walks around the table towards the door to the kitchen.

“If I’m going to be telling you about Rex Glass,” Juno glances back at him, “I’m gonna need a drink.”

“Oh dear,” Nureyev says, as Juno slips out of the room.

Shortly enough, he comes back with two glasses of whiskey, and guides Nureyev to the sofa near the monitor where Rita puts her streams up on family nights. Whiskey isn’t Nureyev’s first choice in drink, but Juno seems to have at least spared thought to him, because on his first sip Nureyev can tell that it’s been heavily diluted.

“Well,” Nureyev claps his hands together, “You said the name Rex Glass?”

Juno groans, “Let me start with Duke Rose. He’s a little easier to unpack.”

After Nureyev sits through the ensuing utter humiliation of having one of his aliases picked apart to shreds, he feels a little raw. It’s not necessarily a…  _ bad  _ feeling -- there is an embarrassed smile lurking in the corners of his mouth that refuses to go away, and he can still taste the laughter in his throat -- but it is challengingly confronting. And that’s when Juno opens his mouth and continues speaking: 

“But Duke, I could handle. Now,  _ Rex. _ I have no idea what possessed you to create that guy.”

“My God,” Nureyev says, “You’ve already told me I created a character whose main purpose seemed to be to fawn over you and play stupid -- what could Rex possibly have done worse?” 

“He was harmless at his core, I think, but  _ man  _ was he overbearing,” Juno sits up on the couch and then puts on what Nureyev can only  _ guess  _ is an impersonation of his own voice, pitched a little lower than perhaps Juno’s vocal range allows, by the way it cracks every few words.

“Oh, Juno,” Juno attempts to purr his own name, “My life belongs up there among the stars, blah blah blah, you’re very handsome like this, morally outraged, it’s so sexy. I jack off listening to classical music while surrounded by rose petals.”

Nureyev buries his head in his hands and giggles helplessly, “Good God, that’s embarrassing.” Juno’s exaggerated impersonation has, unfortunately, just enough accuracy to the overbearing sex appeal and obnoxious attitude that Nureyev can catch snippets of his handiwork within it.

“Awful, right?”

“ _ Well _ ,” Nureyev lifts his head from his hands to arch an eyebrow at Juno, “Perhaps not all that awful. Rex Glass seemed to have quite the effect on you. How was it that I stole the key from your coat again?”

“Shut up,” a couch cushion hits him on the arm, and Nureyev laughs again. Juno laughs too, a breathy, soft kind of sound, and then they drift into silence.

“You know, I…” Juno says at last, then clears his throat, “Never got to hear you laugh. I mean, apart from when you were faking it. It’s… nice.”

Nureyev feels all at once stripped bare, and some instinctive part of him freezes in place. Well. He hadn’t even noticed his walls coming down until Juno pointed out the rubble at his feet. Speaking of effects on each other, the one Juno has on him is… dangerous, to say the least.

Still, Nureyev draws himself up and manages to give Juno a polite smile, “Yes, well. I don’t get to laugh much. I suppose I should thank you for the opportunity.”

“Oh, really? I could fix that for you.”

Before Nureyev can ask what in the hell that means, Juno pounces. His fingers find their way to Nureyev’s ribs, and—

Nureyev arches, shrieking with laughter as Juno presses him backwards onto the couch cushions and tickles him. “Stop, stop!” he chokes out, and Juno hesitates just long enough for Nureyev to get the advantage.

“Ha!” Nureyev moves while he has the opening, shoving Juno back. There’s a tangle of limbs for a moment before the dust settles, the two of them panting slightly.

Nureyev is in Juno’s lap, his hands tight around Juno’s wrists, which he has pinned on the top of the couch.

Juno stares up at him with a wide eye, until his throat bobs, and he relaxes a little, softening into the couch and into the restraints of Nureyev’s hands. He raises an eyebrow, a smug smile crawling onto his face, “Alright, so you caught me. What do you plan on doing with me, huh?”

The ten different smart remarks he had planned to say dissolve from the tip of Peter’s tongue, replaced with the gentle sputtering of a motor that has just been short-circuited. He blinks down at Juno’s face.

Juno frowns. “You good in there, Nureyev?” he asks, and Nureyev’s eyes trace over the wrinkles between his eyebrows, the downward turn of his mouth, and realises, with frightening certainty, that he wants, very badly, to kiss him.

He jolts his hands from Juno’s wrists. “Right—My apologies, detective, I was quite lost in my head. I hope I didn’t cause you any discomfort.”

“You’re still, uh. Sitting on me.”

“Of course!” Nureyev quickly rolls out of Juno’s lap and back onto the couch. “Right. I’m very sorry, Juno.” 

“It’s fine,” Juno mumbles a little awkwardly, and then he sighs and says, “Oh no.”

That’s all he gets out before he doubles over, and starts hacking up his lungs again. Nureyev places a hand on Juno’s back and rubs it gently, and frowns to himself. 

As long as Peter Nureyev can remember, his reaction to reaching forks in life’s road has been to pull out a knife -- and then run in the opposite direction as fast as possible. Now he feels as though he’s caught in an intersection with an impossible choice in every direction. Stay on the ship, or leave it. Turn them in, or don’t. Act on his feelings for Juno Steel… or draw back. He is paralysed with decision, and the longer he hesitates, the worse the outcome of every option becomes.

He’s spent too long around Juno, now, to simply withdraw from his life painlessly. But his hesitation has made the window on his opportunity to confess almost too small to crawl through. Now that it’s been made public that Juno won’t make it to the end of their mission, would it be that far of a stretch to believe it too convenient that Nureyev has waited until  _ now _ to say anything?

“Juno,” he says, when Juno’s recovered and is heaving to get his breath back. “I’m making this worse for you, aren’t I? I have been, this entire time.”

Juno wheezes for breath and tries to shake his head, but Nureyev is already moving back from him.

“It’s true. I remember from my own experience that everything that reminded me of— well, you— used to make my coughing come on stronger. This is worse than that. You’re spending concentrated time with me.”

A darkening cloud of dread begins to collate over Nureyev’s head as he continues to talk, “This is all my fault. I promised you that I wouldn’t make things worse for you, and I have anyway, because of my selfish desire to know more about myself through you, without being willing to commit the full way. I--”

Juno grabs at his arm, “Hey. Hey, Nureyev, hey, shhh, shh,” he soothes. “You’re talking a million miles an hour, slow down, c’mon.”

Nureyev can’t look him in the eye. He laughs, slightly hysterically, and closes his own. “And now I’ve got you caring for  _ me  _ when I’m the one who’s got you like this…”   


“Nureyev,” Juno turns on the couch and takes both Nureyev’s hands in his own. “Listen to me, okay? Even if you had stayed on the opposite side of the ship from me the entire goddamn year, it’s still not certain I would’ve made it to the end.”

As he continues to talk, his jaw hardens. That familiar fire begins to burn in his eyes. His voice, though hoarse and scratched, is firm. Certain. “It has been… magical, getting to know you again, Nureyev. That’s what I want you to take away from this experience, okay? Out of all the ways I could’ve spent my last year alive, being here -- being surrounded by people I love, and yes, that includes you -- that’s a gift of its own, okay? It’s all I want.” 

Nureyev hears himself make a wounded sound. “Juno,” he says. He feels the tide of helplessness rush up in his body — his fear of being unable to do anything for Juno feels like he’s pounding against the walls of a cage that won’t stop tightening around him. 

“Just stay with me, alright?” Juno asks, “Right up until the end. And don’t… don’t feel bad. I made my choice, okay? I’m alright with it. I really, really am. And I’m sorry. I never wanted to make you feel like this.”

Juno pauses for breath, and then hesitates, his eyebrows twitching. “Wait, what do you mean you haven’t been willing to  _ commit _ the full--”

Nureyev kisses him.

Juno makes a soft sound of surprise, and then melts back into the couch. Nureyev moves with him, pushing him back as he crowds closer to his body. Juno’s kiss is better than Nureyev had allowed himself to fantasise, his lips soft and warm, his hands sliding around Nureyev’s back to brush over his shirt gently while they kiss, long and slow. 

They part, and Juno pulls Nureyev fully into his lap, and kisses him again. He reaches up to tangle his hand in his hair, and makes another little noise into Nureyev’s mouth, gentle and desperate. Nureyev tries to muster every single feeling he’s felt for Juno Steel and pass it through his lips to him. 

And then Juno pulls back, gently. His eye stays closed long after he’s leaned back, and Nureyev opens his mouth to say the words:  _ I love you.  _

But before he can, Juno opens his eye again, and there’s something in his gaze that kills the words in Nureyev’s throat.. “That…” he says, and his voice breaks, “was pretty cruel, Nureyev.”

Nureyev blinks. His body runs cold, “Juno—”

“I mean, the one thing I asked you not to do was play with my feelings and this isn’t-- it’s not some game. I get you feel guilty, or whatever, and--and maybe you thought you had to  _ try _ , or something, but I can’t deal with misplaced hope. Not this close to the end.”

“Juno, it wasn’t misplaced,” Nureyev says urgently, “I’ve been thinking about it, about the time I’ve spent with you, and I think it’s entirely possible that--”

“Fuck,” Juno closes his eye again and then laughs softly. He pushes Nureyev off of him and onto the couch, “God damn you.” 

“Juno—”

“Don’t say a word. Don’t say a word to me,” Juno says, his voice low and sure, and then he walks out of the room. 

Nureyev sits in silence in the living room after Juno has left him. He can still feel the phantom warmth of him against his body, and his head is still ringing with the aftershocks of the kiss they’d shared. 

A hysterical panic rises in him, from deep in his body, through his spine and heart and out to his fingers, which he can feel start to shake. He swallows thickly and tries to pack the feeling away. He focuses on the shine of his shoes on the floor to keep him occupied on anything else, before even they start to blur in his vision. 

What in hell has he done?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alternative chapter title: mistletoe. 
> 
> you know, the chapter didnt end here originally but i put a poll out on twitter and the ppl voted for 'extra pain' so here we go! see yall in 2 days for the next update !


	9. gladoli

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this is what the last chapter WOULD have ended on. don't worry, i'll post the next chapter too ! i just want to keep it separate for uh. reasons that sort of become obvious at the end

When Nureyev hears a knock at the door later that night, he assumes it is Juno here to talk to him further, or yell at him more -- whichever he deserves. His heart runs cold in his chest and he paces the room.

It’s better to talk, he tells himself -- he had spent the entire afternoon terrified that Juno would never want to so much as look at him again, and  _ anything  _ must be better than that. He pushes down the part of him that knows, with sinking certainty, that a person like him couldn’t have given Juno Steel the happy ending he deserved anyway, and opens the door.

Whatever he was prepared for, it certainly wasn’t what actually happens. Something small barrels into him and pounds tiny fists against his body. 

Rita is in hysterics. She pushes him back into his room, punching him anywhere she can get her hands to connect. Nureyev reaches down to her shoulders and pushes her back, holding her at arm’s length, “Rita! Rita—”

“—gotta do something about it, Mista Euanthe, you just  _ gotta _ ,” now Nureyev can hear that there are words falling out of her mouth between large heavy sobs, and finally she exhausts herself, putting all her weight against Nureyev’s arms until he can’t hold her back anymore and she falls into him. She wraps her arms around his waist and cries into his stomach. 

“Miss Rita…” he says, a little bewildered, and guides them both back to his bed to sit her down on it. 

“It’s just— it’s just— it’s just—” Rita’s breath hitches around her sobs, “He’s gonna die, Mista Euanthe, and it just ain’t fair, not after everything he’s— he’s— he’s been through, not after everything I saw him go through, it just ain’t fair, and you gotta  _ do some-th-th-thing _ ,” she wails, and dissolves into tears again.

Nureyev feels sick through to his rotten core. He reaches out after a moment and puts his hand on her shoulder, “I’m sorry, Rita—”

“No! You don’t get ta be sorry about this, not when you could just— fix it!”

“It’s not that simple—”

“Of course it is!” Rita shouts at him. “You fell in love with him once before, didn’tcha? He’s the same lady now as the one you fell in love with, maybe even better than he was back then, and if you could just fall in love with him we wouldn’t have to watch him  _ di-i-ie _ .”

She dissolves into tears again, and Nureyev isn’t sure what to say to her. Does he tell her that he already has fallen for Juno again? Does he tell her that his attempt to convince Juno of it ended with things arguably worse off than they were before he had? Does he tell her that sometimes that’s how lives end -- broken, and betrayed, and that just because a better outcome  _ was possible  _ doesn’t mean it gets to happen? That sometimes the worst possible outcome happens no matter what you try, and that in the face of that, how else are you supposed to live except by trying to keep as far away from the ramifications as possible?

Nureyev settles on rubbing circles into her back, instead of saying any of that. It feels unusually cruel to shatter Rita’s rose-tinted view of the universe. “I’ll try my best, Rita. I’ll do what I can. I promise.” 

“You better. I’m gonna say this to you once, Mista Euanthe, I don’t care who you are or what’s going on. I  _ ain’t  _ letting my best friend die here. I ain’t ever gonna forgive you if that happens.” 

Nureyev supposes that’s understandable, and that’s alright. It was nice playing at it for a while, but the universe has proven to him over and over again that relationships tend to crumble between his fingers. Even if he hadn’t completely bungled the way he’d handled confessing to Juno, he likely would have lost him or Rita some way or another.

“Is there anything else I can do, Rita?” Nureyev says tiredly, but Rita just shakes her head and keeps sniffling. 

Nureyev lies back on his bed and stares at the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

Rita reaches out and grabs his hand. Hers is wet and slimy, but he suppresses a shiver at the sensation.

“I’m sorry, too,” she sniffles out. “It’s not your fault, Mista Euanthe. I just wish… I wish…” 

She dissolves into tears again, and Nureyev stays quiet while she cries it out. 

Eventually, Rita leaves Nureyev on his bed. He’s long used to dealing with his feelings on his own, but it’s been a long time since his hurt has been as deep as this, and he misses her company even if she hates his guts. 

He tries to rationalise the feeling. Put it away so it can claw its way out of its grave later and eat him up inside some other time. Sometimes he feels more zombie apocalypse than human being, evading the ravenous denizens of his mind until some inevitable day where he is bitten and finally succumbs. 

There’s nothing he can do about Juno’s situation, and he has to make peace with that.

Still, it’s many long hours he spends staring at the ceiling before he starts to doze off, and just as he does he hears another knock at the door.

Nureyev closes his eyes and breathes long out of his nose. He’s not sure he can deal with another round of Rita being upset at him. 

When he opens the door, it is not Rita there ready to assault him. His breath catches in his throat. 

“Ju—”

“Shut up,” Juno mutters, and grabs Nureyev by the lapels, pulling him into a kiss. 


	10. red poppy [E]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ohohoho...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO UH. This chapter is explicit lol. If you don't want to read that, that's cool -- I intentionally made this chapter just for the sex scene so that it's skippable. 
> 
> BUT THERE'S STILL PLOT RELEVANT STUFF HERE, SORRY! SO please at least read the end notes if you're not going to read the chapter! I'm also going to mark the end of the Explicit stuff with XXX so you can skip it if you want to read what comes after.

Nureyev’s back hits the wall and his arms wrap around Juno’s neck. Things are moving too quickly for him to properly think. Juno kisses him hard, his mouth open and warm against his. Nureyev scrapes his teeth against Juno’s bottom lip, and relishes the little groan he makes into Nureyev’s mouth in return. 

Then he breaks away from him, and coughs into his hand.

“Juno—” now that he has the space for his thoughts to collect, the arousal that had started pooling in his stomach quickly dissipates, “Are you sure about this?”

Instead of answering, Juno kisses him again, and Nureyev can taste the faint perfume of roses. He pushes Juno away, “I’m going to need you to answer me.”

“Course I’m sure,” Juno growls.

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself,” Nureyev argues. “And I especially don’t want you to be doing anything that makes this worse.” 

Juno sighs. His hands are on Nureyev’s hips, and he meets his eyes. “I want this,” he says, softly. “A lot. I’m sure about it. Okay?” he pauses for a moment, “Are you?”

Nureyev sighs. Juno is so exquisitely hard to resist with his broad warm hands on Nureyev’s hips and his brown eye searching Nureyev’s face, “I am. But you need to tell me what it is you want from me, exactly."

“You’re killing the mood here,” Juno complains, but when Nureyev’s expression doesn’t change, he sighs. His gaze drops to the floor.

“Just… prove it to me,” his voice comes out quiet. “You say you really feel for me like that, then…you gotta make me believe it.” 

“And… this is the best way to do that?”

Juno swallows, “It’s what worked last time.”

Nureyev sinks in that thought for a moment, that somehow the last time they had been together, it had been the way he _slept with him_ that had Juno convinced he was in love with him. He laughs a little, “That’s a lot of pressure to put on a man.”

“We don’t have--”

“But I’ll give it a shot,” Nureyev talks over him. It’s not like it will be particularly _hard_ to sleep with Juno -- besides, perhaps, in the literal sense -- and if this could save his life, he would be a fool to say no. “As long as you make sure to _tell_ me if it’s too much. And if you start coughing, we stop. Agreed?”

A petulant look crosses Juno’s face in response, “Even if I do, I’ll be _fine_ Nureyev, it’s not—”

“It’s not about your comfort. It’s about mine,” Nureyev doubles down. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I was worried about you choking yourself to death on flower petals.”

Juno looks at him for a long moment. Then he nods, “Alright. Okay. We stop if I start to cough.” 

With that, Nureyev smiles, and drags him back into a kiss. 

Peter Nureyev is a master of seduction. It’s one of the skills that he’s rather proud of, and he’s certain that whatever he did with Juno all that time ago was a combination of tricks he can pull from his arsenal and replicate. Juno presses him hard against the wall and Nureyev finds himself letting a little sound into Juno’s mouth, pressing his tongue forward past Juno’s lips. 

Juno melts right into him, making fists in his shirt, tugging his hips closer and sighing shakily at the ensuing friction between their bodies. Nureyev pushes away from the wall and is delighted with the way Juno steps with him, eager to be led wherever he wants to take him.

Which, of course, is the bed. They fall onto it together, Juno immediately shifting to get comfortable and pulling Nureyev more on top of him. Nureyev reaches for the hem of Juno’s shirt, and with a little help from him, it gets thrown over the side of the bed.

Nureyev takes a moment to appreciate the view: the curls of salt-and-pepper hair twisting over the brown expanse of his skin. His chest, with each nipple pierced with a barbell that glints in the light as Juno breathes.

“Oh, Juno,” Nureyev murmurs, and leans down to press his lips to Juno’s collarbone. “You’re beautiful.”

Juno’s chest heaves under his lips with the breathy laugh he lets out, “That’s what you said last time.”

" _Well._ It must be true, now, mustn’t it?” Nureyev leans back to smile impishly at Juno. He runs his hand down Juno’s stomach, following the track with his eyes. _Think adoration,_ he instructs himself, and sighs. He bites his lip before he looks back up at Juno. 

“You, uh…” Juno swallows. “Wanna get your own shirt off any time soon?” 

Nureyev smiles, “This is about you, love. We’ll get to me when the time is right.” He leans down again and presses a kiss to Juno’s full lips. Juno moans softly and raises his hands to either side of Nureyev’s waist. Nureyev tugs a little on the lip ring through Juno’s bottom lip, and relishes the sound Juno makes before he moves to trail kisses down his jaw.

Nureyev rolls his hips against Juno’s, and Juno gasps, “Fuck.”

“Mmmm,” Nureyev rolls his hips again, and again. He nibbles at Juno’s earlobe, then props himself up on his chest. " _Love,_ ” he sighs, and lets his eyes flutter closed. “You’re so wonderful, Juno.”

When he opens his eyes again, the way Juno is looking at him has changed. Something in his gaze puts a splinter of fear into Nureyev’s spine -- he’s doing this wrong. It isn’t working.

He can’t remember what Juno had liked. Is he not being dominant enough? He had thought perhaps a tender approach would be more effective, but then, Juno seems the submissive type. He attempts to regain his composure, rearranging his features into a sly smile.

“Are you going to be good for me, darling?” he purrs, and leans down to kiss Juno again when he’s stopped short.

“Stop. Stop,” Juno says, with a hand on Nureyev’s chest, and Nureyev freezes.

“What’s wrong?” he blurts out, “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Juno looks up at him for a long moment before he sighs. “Just… you’re acting.”

Nureyev blinks, “Beg pardon?”

“You’re acting. Like I’m some mark you have to impress. That’s-- that’s not what it was like, last time.”

“I… see.” Juno has seen through him so easily. Nureyev can feel his heart pick up in his chest. He had been this vulnerable with Juno last time, that he can see through him now? “What… is it that you want?”

“Just… be yourself,” Juno says. “If you… want, I guess. Obviously don’t push yourself, or make yourself uncomfortable, but… if you want me to believe Peter Nureyev has feelings for me, you gotta let me feel like it’s Peter Nureyev I’m giving a chance.”

Nureyev swallows thickly. “Of course,” his voice comes out a little hoarse.

Juno reaches up slowly, inch by inch. Their next kiss is far more tentative, uncertain. Nureyev follows Juno back down into the mattress and tries to _let go._

Juno arches up slightly into Nureyev’s chest and moans softly, and Nureyev can’t stop kissing him. Juno starts to tug at the buttons of Nureyev’s shirt, and Nureyev lets him -- shivering when Juno’s warm hands brush over his stomach. Soon the shirt is discarded, and still they are only kissing. 

This is slower than anything Nureyev is used to, but it feels -- right. He lets his lips follow the line of Juno’s throat down to his collarbone, and lets his hand drift down Juno’s stomach, further and further, until he gasps quietly near Nureyev’s ear.

“Alright?” he asks.

“Don’t stop,” Juno breathes in return.

Nureyev has to, actually, because the position of his wrist like this is not something he can maintain for long. But he prefers it anyway, when he adjusts the both of them so that he can grind against Juno instead of touch him -- and Juno doesn’t seem to mind. 

“Fuck,” he tips his head back against the pillow, and Nureyev leans down to press his lips to Juno’s pulse point. Juno’s heart races under his mouth.

“ _Nureyev_ ,” Juno’s voice shakes, and Nureyev feels his own heart stutter in his chest. He’s never heard his name said like this, with such intimacy. “Fuck. Kiss me?”

Nureyev obliges, of course. And he obliges again when Juno grabs onto his waist and leans up to meet him, again when Juno’s hands slide down to Nureyev’s ass, pressing them closer together. Friction burns between their hips, and Nureyev gasps into Juno's mouth before he kisses him again. Again and again, until Juno snaps his head back against the pillow.

“Uh--Hh,” he gasps, and his arms wrap around Nureyev’s back, clinging to him like he needs him. “Nur-- _eyev_.”

“Juno,” Nureyev murmurs, “ _Juno._ ”

Juno goes tight underneath him, and his hips twitch up against Nureyev’s. He makes a hitching, breathless sound, and then a soft _oh--_ and he shudders apart into the mattress.

Nureyev feels Juno underneath him -- the movement of his muscles as he twitches, of his chest as he gets his breath back. He feels something swell inside of him, something bigger than the electric-burning feeling in his stomach and hips. His ears ring with the sound of his name, stretched out like Juno had sighed it. It is magical, has been magical -- if this was what the first time was like, it all makes sense that Juno Steel left such a terminal impact on his life when they separated.

**XXX**

And it’s being high off that feeling that makes Nureyev sigh and lean up to meet Juno’s gaze, “You have to believe me now.”

Juno looks up at him with a soft eye and open lips. Until Nureyev’s words seem to sink in, and the fragile look on his face shifts into something harder. Nureyev feels his own heart grow cold. Juno doesn’t believe him.

Then Juno starts to cough. 

Nureyev rolls off of him quickly, and Juno rolls too so that he’s hanging off the side of the bed. His whole body shakes, terrible choking sounds leaving his throat, and Nureyev is helpless to do anything but put a hand on Juno’s back and rub. Juno heaves, and heaves, and then gets frozen with his mouth open, his throat undulating until an almost entire rose falls out of his mouth onto the carpet below. 

He stays hovering over the side of the bed, tears running down his face, for a long moment while he gasps for his breath back. 

Nureyev feels his gut sink.

“Fuck,” Juno lets out, his voice broken and breath watery. 

“Juno,” Nureyev murmurs, “Let me get you a drink of water. You just lie here or-- get changed if you need to. There’s tissues-- somewhere in this mess. I’ll be right back.”

He slips out of bed. He wraps a robe around himself, and leaves the room towards the kitchen. He downs a glass of water himself, to distract himself from the urge to cry. The kitchen is silent and empty, and it crosses Nureyev’s mind that he could just stay here, in the dark and solitude, until he has gotten a hold of himself. He needn’t go back to Juno. 

He gets Juno a glass of cold water, and walks back to his room. 

Juno is sitting on his bed, although the tissue box is now beside him and his shirt is back on. His shoulders shake, and Nureyev realises he is still crying.

“Juno,” Nureyev walks over to the bed, placing the glass down on the side table, “It’s alright.”

“No it’s not,” Juno croaks, and what can Nureyev say in response to that?

He sits himself on the bed beside Juno and then hands him across the glass of water. Juno takes it wordlessly and lifts it to his mouth, sipping at it. 

“I take this to mean this didn’t help you believe me,” Nureyev says at last.

Juno lowers his glass and wipes at his eyes. “I thought—” he says with a hoarse voice, and then sniffs again. “Last time. You told me you loved me last time, and I guess I thought—I dunno. I believed it when you told me then. You seemed like you wanted to give me all of you. I guess I thought it would work.”

“Juno,” Nureyev sighs. “What’s different now?”

Juno sniffles. “I can’t stop my brain from telling me you’re just doing it to keep me alive. Fuck. Even this, I mean… what’s it to you to fuck a lady if it gets him any closer to believing your lie? Obviously you were only thinking about saving me--”

“ _Juno_ ,” Nureyev says, exasperated, “ _Of course_ I was thinking about saving you. You can’t judge my feelings based on that, can you?”

Then the frustration begins to rise in him. “You talk about me not playing with your feelings, then you-- you do _this_ to me?” He is almost shaking with that understanding: that he could have experienced something as precious as _this_ and have it still be not enough.

Juno sniffles again. He shrugs, and when he talks, there’s nothing in his voice but tiredness, “Yeah. I know it’s not fair. Fuck.”

Nureyev’s anger can’t do anything but drain out in the face of Juno’s plainness. He bites his lip so hard it almost bleeds, and looks away. There’s nothing he can do to make Juno believe him, and so he’s forced to watch Juno die beside him. It’s enough that he could cry. Maybe if he could, Juno might be that much closer to being convinced -- but his body betrays him, as usual, and his eyes stay dry. All he is left to do is sit there and think to himself how insistent his life seems to be on proving to him that Peter Nureyev doesn’t get to keep those he loves.

“I’m sorry,” Juno says quietly. “I shouldn’t have done this to you. Made everything worse.”

“I’m only worried about you,” Nueyev says. “I have to say, I try not to make a habit of making people cry after I sleep with them.”

Juno gives Nureyev a half laugh. “Yeah. Sorry.”

They descend into silence. Juno wipes his nose with the back of his hand, “I should go.”

“You don’t want to stay?” even to his own ears, Nureyev sounds like he’s pleading.

“I…” Juno swallows, and won’t meet Nureyev’s eyes. “Gotta get hooked up to all my oxygen machines and stuff. Can’t really move them easily.” 

“Oh,” Nureyev says. 

“Fuck,” Juno hangs his head suddenly, laughing breathlessly. “I’m so sorry. This was a bad idea.”

“It’s alright, Juno,” Nureyev says.

Juno gets off of the bed. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and makes for the door like he wants to slip out of the room without saying a word more. When he actually reaches the door, though, he pauses, and glances back.

“This, uh… was nice, though,” he says. “You’re...it was good. Even if it didn’t work.” 

He leaves while Nureyev is still trying to think of what to say to that. Nureyev falls back on his bed and closes his eyes.

He can still feel his body ringing with the aftershocks of Juno’s touch. His body feels raw, peeled open and laid bare by Juno’s warm eyes and broad fingers and his low murmuring voice right in his ear.

It’s not a bad feeling -- and that’s what frightens him. Because nobody has made him feel as _seen_ as Juno does: and he does it like it’s nothing, like it’s no big deal, like bringing people to their knees is a side-effect of being around Juno Steel that he doesn’t even know he causes. He is as untouchable as the goddess who shares his name, and Nureyev has no chance at winning back his favour.

The thing he had with Juno once upon a time -- could have had with him again -- is rare. And precious. And Nureyev has fucked it up at every turn. If he’d kept his stupid mouth shut longer, perhaps their night together would’ve continued and Juno would’ve been convinced. If he hadn’t spent his whole stupid life working so hard at keeping his feelings unparseable, intentionally cryptic even from himself, perhaps Juno wouldn’t need convincing in the first place.

Just for the dramatic irony of it all, Nureyev begins -- quite helplessly -- to cry. Silent tears drip into the pillows behind his head, and Nureyev is too tired to fight it away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLOT RELEVANT STUFF: Juno tries to have sex with Nureyev so that he can convince himself Nureyev's feelings are genuine. It sort of works for a bit, until Nureyev jumps the gun with asking Juno if he believes him yet, which shatters the moment and Juno starts to cough. Nureyev goes to get Juno water and when he comes back, Juno apologises for making everything worse. Juno leaves, and Nureyev blames himself for how everything went.


	11. red tulip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second last chapter...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooh we in it now!
> 
> CWs: sexual references, gun violence

The first time Juno actually lays eyes on Rita since she heard the news that he's on death's door, she doesn't look all that upset. 

He still feels like shit from the night before, from that -- _fuck up_ with Nureyev, so he doesn't pay her much mind. He just treks onwards towards the coffee machine, Rita following  close on his heels, a sound like a kettle boiling emanating from… somewhere on her. Juno doesn’t care. 

He makes it to the coffee machine, and she makes it to her seat at the kitchen bench before she finally bursts. “So!?” she screeches, “Did it work?”

“Huh?” 

What isn't helping his mood is that he’d seen Nureyev in the hallway on the way here. He’d met his eyes before darting his gaze quickly away, slipping past Juno in the other direction without a word.

How is he meant to feel after that? 

“You’ve gotta be kidding me, boss! The suspense is killing me! How. Did. It. Go. With. Mista. Euanthe?!” Rita bounces in her seat with every word.

Juno glares over his shoulder at her before he goes back to making his coffee, spooning out some sugar from the little frog-shaped container that sits near the stove. “I dunno what the hell you’re on about, Rita.”

“Mista Steel! But you— but he! You were in his  _ room  _ last night! You slept together!” 

Juno drops the spoon right into his coffee and slams the mug down on the bench. He whirls around to face Rita, who is very quickly shrinking down in her seat and looking very much like she’s said something she shouldn’t have. “He told you?” Juno hisses.

“No!” Rita bounces up again, “I ain’t even seen him today! I figured he was still sleepin’ off all that exercise…”

“Then how did you—” Juno closes his eyes. “Your room’s next to his.”

“Ya-huh. When I heard you outside Mista Euanthe’s door I was real confused as to what you was doin’ visiting him, so I took a little peek and I gotta say Mista Steel I ain’t ever seen someone kiss someone so aggressivel—”

“Okay! Yep! Okay, Rita, I— get the picture,” Juno feels his face flush hot. “Fuck.”

“ _ So _ ?” Rita screeches at him, slamming both her palms down on the table.

Juno shrugs his shoulder, “So, nothing. Nothing happened. I’m still… sick.” 

“What?!” Rita screams at the top of her lungs, “But, Mista Steel! You— but! The two of you—! That just don’t make any sense! I asked Mista Euanthe and he  _ promised  _ me he’d try—Uh oh.”

She says 'uh oh', because at her words, Juno turns a gaze as cold as ice on her. “What did you say?” he asks, murderous. 

Rita squeaks, “Nothin', Mista Steel!” 

Juno closes his eye. He laughs softly to himself, and shakes his head. To think he’d almost believed Nureyev last night, and here’s the truth of it. Not a pity fuck, Nureyev had said. Promised. “You told him to do something, didn’t you?” 

“I—all I said was that he fell in love with you once, it can’t be that hard to do it again…” Rita trails off and sits down in her chair. When she speaks again, her voice is very small, “I made things worse, didn’t I, Mista Steel?”

Juno forces himself to breathe evenly. It’s not Rita’s fault, he reminds himself. 

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Rita,” Juno mutters at her. “You were just… trying. I guess.”

Rita sniffles, “It’s just— it’s just— it’s just— Mista Steel, I don’t  _ want _ you to die!”

“I don’t wanna die either,” Juno says. He takes a sip of his coffee and sets it back down on the bench again. “Hey, who knows. Maybe by some miracle it’ll turn out we figure out how to use the Curemother prime before I kick the bucket. I’ve always been good at living longer than I thought I would.”

“You think so?” Rita wipes at one of her eyes. 

“Anything’s possible,” Juno says, and hopes that his flat tone doesn’t make it obvious he’s not optimistic. Juno steps forward and reaches out to put a hand on top of her head. “I’m… sorry, Rita. I’m sorry this is tough for you. It’s tough for me too. I’m sorry I might have to leave you.”

“Don’t talk about it like that,” Rita says. She reaches up and takes his hand from the top of her head, instead moving it to her cheek. She nestles against it. “It ain’t your fault.”

It sort of is, Juno thinks, but he knows better than to say it. Instead, he just leans forward and gives her a kiss on the forehead. “If there’s anything I can do to make it easier for you… let me know, okay?” he says quietly. She nods. 

Life on the Carte Blanche is filled with a lot of that while they get ready for the Curemother prime heist. This… heavy melancholy feeling. Juno gets it, he does, but it’s also… isolating. Everybody acts strangely around him. When he walks into a room, the conversation seems to go silent for a moment before it resumes. The hardest part of it all is that Nureyev still won’t talk to him. 

The half-look Nureyev had given him before his eyes had flickered away in the hallway the day after they… you know… isn’t the first time Juno sees it. Every time he does, it hurts a little more. 

It’s not like Juno can really blame Nureyev. He was the one who walked into Nureyev’s room and pulled him into a kiss. Nureyev only did exactly what Juno asked him to do. …Even if maybe Nureyev only went along with it because Rita asked him to do something? It’s… a really, really complicated situation.

Nureyev probably feels bad that his attempt failed. Or maybe Rita told him what happened in the kitchen, and Nureyev feels bad that Juno found out his attempt wasn’t genuine. Or maybe Juno just hurt him by making him feel responsible for his steadily approaching death. Everything was so much easier when they just… kept their distance from each other. Why did Juno have to go fuck it up?

In the end, it becomes unbearable. One day, he’s passing Nureyev in the hallway, and before he can stop himself, he reaches out and grabs Nureyev’s wrist.

Nureyev pulls it out of Juno’s grip in an instant — reflex — but he stops moving. He looks at Juno, and then then his gaze drops away. “Detective,” he says, cordially. 

“Hey. Can we... talk? I— can't stop thinking I’ve done wrong by you, and… I don't want us to end on the wrong note. I get it if you can't look at me the same way again, but--I'm being selfish, here. I don't want my last memory of you to be something... painful."

Nureyev closes his eyes. He sighs. “I’m sorry, Juno,” he says, “I haven’t meant to hurt you. I’m simply…”

He can’t finish his sentence, but he lifts his eyes to meet Juno’s again, at least. He gives him a weak, small little smile. “Thank you for letting me know, Juno. I’ll do better by you.” 

“Yeah… alright,” Juno frowns slightly. 

Nureyev smiles at him a little wider, and then turns and slips down the hallway.

Juno watches him go. Then he sighs, and continues his own way.

He spends a lot of time one on one with Vespa, which is fine. She does the best she can, and every now and then he even gets glimpses of genuine kindness nestled in between her poor bedside manner. He likes to think that they’ve become good friends.

She sets him up on oxygen, and he has to admit that the first night he sleeps with air being forcefully pushed down his throat, he actually wakes up… feeling better. More rested. Except for when he takes the mask off of his face and he realises his mouth and throat feel dry and raw as hell. It’s nothing a few good cups of coffee can’t fix, though, and Jet and Rita worked together on giving the coffee machine a few decent upgrades. The coffee on the ship now is so good it’s almost worth the way the machine talks to you about what streams it thinks you should watch based off your coffee order while it makes it for you. 

While he makes his coffee one morning, Peter Nureyev walks into the room. Juno isn’t expecting much — which is why it surprises him when he comes to a stop with his hip resting against the bench right next to Juno. “Have you actually watched any of the streams the coffee machine recommends?” he asks.

Juno almost doesn’t believe he’s actually talking to him. “Uh…” he says. “No? Not really. I’m not exactly looking for new streams to keep me occupied over the next few years, Euanthe.” 

“Hm,” Nureyev concedes, “I tried the first few episodes of one of them the other day. I found it quite enjoyable. You might like it too, if you’re in the market for spending a few hours of your time with a friend.”

He’s… offering to spend some time with Juno. When he looks at him, it’s right on, and his eyes are sparkling. It makes Juno’s heart catch in his throat.

“That’d be nice,” Juno’s voice comes out a little hoarse, “I’d like that.” 

“Tonight?” Nureyev asks, and Juno nods.

Nureyev smiles. 

The rest of the day moves relatively quickly now that he’s got something to be excited about at the end of it. Most of the days, the other crew members are locked up in meetings trying to decide how to tackle the Curemother prime heist when they’re down one person. Juno has to do stretches and different stupid things to try and keep his lungs as healthy and make sure he’ll last as long as he possibly can before he kicks the bucket. 

It’s whatever. A few extra days is a few extra days, but the end result is still the same. He’s not about to get his hopes up a few weeks out from the big moment. 

After dinner, Nureyev cocks his head at him from where he sits at the table. Juno gives back a small smile and a nod, and Nureyev makes sure to hang around the kitchen while Juno cleans up the dishes.

“You gonna help out at all, or do you just like standing there and looking at me funny?” Juno asks, and follows it up by throwing a damp tea towel Nureyev’s way. It lands against his stomach and he grabs it.

“I hadn’t thought you’d wanted help,” Nureyev replies indignantly, and Juno rolls his eye. 

It’s sort of fun doing the dishes with Nureyev. Juno splashes him a little with soap bubbles and gets flicked close to the face with the end of the dishcloth in return. It’s the sort of domestic thing he had imagined himself being able to do with Nureyev one day… under vastly different circumstances. For playing with bubbles to turn into tangling his fingers into Nureyev’s hair and kissing him up against the sink.

Of course, the second that thought enters Juno’s mind, he starts to cough, and then — as usual — the mood is ruined. Nureyev always rubs his back while he coughs, and Juno doesn’t know if it helps or if it just makes him want to push Nureyev away, but it’s… nice of him, he guesses. 

“Fuck the dinner plates,” Juno wheezes out as soon as he can breathe again and there’s almost a full goddamn rose bobbing in the water among the plates. “Oughta be illegal to make a sick lady do chores, anyways.”

“You’re… going to leave the rest?” Nureyev asks.

“Fuck yeah, I am,” Juno says. “I’ve got a date with a new stream to get to.”

Nureyev smiles. “Well,” he says, and reaches out his arm, “would the lady like some accompanying?” 

“You betcha he would,” Juno says, and takes Nureyev’s outstretched arm. He ignores the way his chest feels warm at the smile Nureyev fixes him with. 

Their stream night isn’t eventful, but it is… fun. Nureyev’s room is such a goddamn mess Juno almost trips on his first step in. 

“Holy shit, are you kidding me?” he asks, “This place is like eight hundred different safety violations waiting to happen.”

“I’m sure I don’t have to worry about anybody suing me,” Nureyev waves a hand dismissively, “pardon the state of it — I haven’t had the time to think about getting around to sorting it all out.”

“Is that… just an entire pile of used lotion bottles?” Juno asks, mostly to himself.

Nureyev pulls back the sheets on his bed and sets the comms down on the end of it. He clicks a few buttons, and it lights up, projecting a screen into the air just over his bed. “Get yourself comfortable,” he says, sliding into his side, “I’ve found four hours worth of episodes and I plan on watching them all.”

“Four  _ hours _ ?” Juno deadpans.

But the show is nice. It’s nicer when Nureyev starts to lean on Juno’s shoulder, and even nicer still when he gives up on all efforts to pretend and asks if Juno would mind if he curled up next to him. Obviously Juno doesn’t. Nureyev throws an arm over Juno’s stomach, and lies his head on Juno’s shoulder. His smell fills Juno’s lungs with every breath in — that same goddamn cologne. After all of this time. 

It’s nice being able to feel like there’s nothing wrong. No problems with Nureyev. No roses in his lungs. Just… a movie night with someone he loves.

“Thanks, Nureyev,” Juno mumbles sleepily at him at around the third hour mark. “I… really needed this.”

Nureyev doesn’t answer for a moment, and Juno thinks he might have fallen asleep. Then he shifts, his fingers drifting over Juno’s stomach in a soothing rhythm. “It’s alright, Juno,” he says quietly. “It’s the least I could do.”

Juno has to leave in order to get back to his own bed so that he can put his oxygen machine on his face — and besides, he doesn’t feel exactly like falling asleep with Nureyev, or worse, waking up in his arms. Still, he feels better when he falls asleep that night. A little less alone.

By the time the day of the heist arrives, Juno isn’t making it out of bed anymore. 

It had been getting harder and harder to make his way around the ship with his lung capacity so severely reduced, but over the last week it’s gotten to the point where even making it to the kitchen has started to make him breathless, and Vespa has ordered him not to move in order to increase his chances of surviving as long as he can.

Part of Juno doesn’t really see the point in trying. If he has to choose between three more days up and around his crewmates or another week lying in his bed with nothing to do but stare at a wall, he might as well choose the first. But he can tell it makes Rita upset for him to say things like that, so… bed rest it is. 

Rita patches him in so that he can watch the heist unfold from Vespa’s comms. It’s just Vespa and Nureyev going in alone in there, and while they’re less prone to bickering than Juno and Vespa are… he hopes that they don’t end up at a crossroads, threatening each other. Vespa’s half convinced Nureyev is only on the ship to steal from it. Nureyev hasn’t mentioned any debts to speak of, but… he hasn’t mentioned how he got all that money to pay for his surgery, either. And he has been acting… strange.

There’s definitely a lot different between the Peter Nureyev that Juno knew back in Mars and the one that stalks the halls of the ship late at night. Recently, he seems to be almost… harrowed. Like there’s some big thing on his mind that he can’t stop thinking about, obsessing over. To be honest, Juno had just sort of assumed it was the whole hanahaki thing, but… maybe that’s not all. Maybe something bigger lies under the water of Nureyev’s concerns. 

He’s definitely not going to get an answer out of him, that’s for sure. And it’s too late now. Everybody already came in to say goodbye to him, and now they’re… collected in the garage, getting into the Ruby7.

And then they’re gone.

Buddy is in her quarters, manning the mission from there. Juno isn’t quite sure why she didn’t come keep him company in here, but he guesses she’s got bigger things to worry about than keeping an eye on the dying dame, especially if he distracts her with his coughs and wheezes. The important thing is that he gets to watch, and his commspiece even allows him to chat directly to the others — though he doesn’t think he’ll use it. The last thing they need is hearing his wheezes, either. 

Most of the heist goes according to plan, anyways. Buddy had already warned him that the ship would get hit by EMPs, so he’s not too surprised when the ship rocks and jolts in space every so often. For a second, things get hairy with the schematics, and he catches a glimpse of Buddy walking down the hall towards… Nureyev’s bedroom. He doesn’t say anything, though — and it’s a good thing he doesn’t. Her double-checking saves everyone’s life.

Juno isn’t sure what to make of that. He doesn’t like to think of Nureyev as the kind of person who would backstab the crew. Especially not if it’s going to put the others in danger. He doesn’t really care what Nureyev does to him — but Buddy, Vespa, Jet… Rita? That’s what gets his heart racing as Nureyev begs for mercy from Vespa on screen. If he’s done anything that could hurt any of them...

He forgets he’s wearing the commspiece until later on in the heist when Vespa and Nureyev are stuck in a room that has traps out to kill them. He shouts at the screen for a good few minutes before his brain catches up to him and he patches in to the call.

“Guys!” he says, “This doesn’t make any sense!”

“Juno,” Nureyev sounds almost relieved to hear his voice. 

“Juno,” Buddy sounds… not relieved. “You better have a very good reason to be interrupting.”

“I’m telling you, this doesn’t make any goddamn sense.”

And he… gets them through the heist somehow. After Nureyev uses the blade to find the door to the room, Buddy suddenly changes tactics. She’s been sounding weird for the last half an hour of the call, but all of a sudden she lets them know that she’ll be stopping communication completely. Juno doesn’t have time to feel strange about it — before he knows it, she’s barked an instruction for him to keep watching and chime in to the call if necessary along the way, and then the next thing he sees is a flash of her hair as she tears past his room in the direction of the med bay.

No sooner has she done that than a huge wave rocks the ship. It almost tips Juno right out of his bed and onto the floor, and he groans. 

Then… it’s over, and when Juno looks down at the comms screen in his hands, he can see it. The Curemother prime. In Nureyev’s hands as he passes it to Jet, and they all pile back into the back of the Ruby7.

They did it. Even with one person down, they actually did it. 

It’s a celebration that night on the Carte Blanche. Vespa even gets Juno into a wheelchair and lets him wheel himself out of his room and into the common room so that he can be there when Buddy pops the bottle of champagne. It sprays over Rita, Nureyev, and Vespa — Jet stands in the back corner of the room and watches. 

“I’m very proud of you all, darlings,” Buddy says, as she pours the four of them a glass. “I have to say, there have been times when I have doubted that we would all make it out of here alive.” 

“Hey, that’s fun,” Juno mumbles from his bed, and Buddy sends him a winning smile.

“Now, Juno, don’t you get petulant.”

The celebration goes late into the night, and then they all retire for the evening. Vespa wheels Juno back to the medbay and hooks him up to machines that are meant to do their best to right his systems if anything goes funny overnight. 

Even Vespa is different thanks to the success of the night. Earlier, she had been nonstop messing with their latest companion: the squiggly, oozy Curemother prime. That was before Buddy came in and asked her if they could talk in her bedroom, though. It was clear Buddy would’ve rather had the conversation in the medbay, and Juno had tried to make himself as small in his sheets as possible. 

Still, the announcement that had come with the celebration night -- of the wedding to be held on the ship in three days — had Buddy and Vespa both so elated that Juno figures he’s forgiven for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He just hopes, for their sake, that the wedding isn’t ruined by his own funeral. 

Later in the night, as Juno stares at the ceiling of the medbay, the door opens. He fumbles for his gun, feels the rising panic when he can’t find it anywhere, and then Peter Nureyev walks into the room, with both his hands up.

“Only me, detective.”

“Jesus! You wanna kill a lady earlier than he’s already gonna die or something?” 

“My apologies, Juno. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Yeah. Sure,” Juno says. He sighs, and allows Nureyev to take out a seat beside his bed.

Nureyev sits back in the chair. For a long time he says nothing, only sits with his hands folded on his knees and his eyes closed. Then he opens his eyes again. “Juno,” he says quietly. “Are you sure you can’t believe me about how I feel about you?”

Juno’s chest feels tight. This is the first time he’s brought it up in the weeks since that night. He feels Nureyev’s confession like a bubble in his lungs that won’t pop no matter how hard he squeezes. No matter how hard he wants it to. And the harder he tries, the more he feels like maybe he’s just forcing himself to believe it so that he’ll live, and that shatters the momentum entirely.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I don’t know why I don’t, but… I just… can’t.”

Nureyev breathes long out of his nose, his eyes closing again. Then he nods, slightly, like his mind is made up. He stands, and leans down to press a kiss to Juno’s forehead.

Then he leaves the room in total silence. Juno closes his eyes, and tries not to cry. 

He wakes up the next morning heaving for breath, with Vespa hovering over him. She rolls him onto his stomach and holds him while he coughs, and chokes, and gags up a complete rose. Then the coughing doesn’t stop, and he’s suspended in pain, gasping for air while a second flower follows the first. When he’s done, he can taste the mix of perfume and spit and blood all through his mouth and smell it in his nose. His face is wet with tears, and Vespa just puts her arm over his shoulders and holds him close.

“So…” Juno wheezes, “What’s the prognosis, doc?”

Vespa says nothing. She squeezes his shoulder, and then pats his back as she withdraws her arm.

“That bad, huh?” he mutters.

“Matter of days,” Vespa whispers back. When he meets her eyes, she looks… scared. 

Yeah, well. Juno is, too. 

He does manage to make it to the day of the wedding, however. If he’s glad for one thing, it’s that it’ll mean that he’s no longer kept awake some nights with the sound of a screeching bow instrument several doors down. And besides… it’s a nice idea, that the last thing his sorry ass gets to see is something sweet.

He gets wheeled out to the room where the celebration is taking place. Buddy and Vespa exchange their vows. Juno is just feeling a tear well up in the corner of his eye when Nureyev’s body language changes. He shifts uncomfortably, and then…

Outside that huge window, all that nothingness fills up with a big, big something.

Everybody shouts as the Carte Blanche shakes. Rita yells above the noise, “Wh—wh—what is that?!”

Jet’s face is sombre as he stares out at the blinking lights of the thing, “A massive interstellar cruiser… I’ve never seen one so large move so quickly.”

Buddy’s face is drawn. “Dark Matters,” she mumbles quietly, and then she whips around to face Jet. “There’s no time to waste. Jet, warm up the Ruby 7, Vespa will take Juno, I will get the Curemother prime and meet you—”

They all hear the sound of people warping onto their ship together, and Buddy trails off into a quiet “…oh no.”

The door slides open, and a short agent with a dark bob of hair walks briskly into the room.

“Buddy Aurinko and associates, this is Subdirector G of Dark Matters. You have been found in violation of DM code 36-point-2-2-7, ‘Possession of galactic radical’. Drop any and all weaponry on the ground or we will open fire.” 

Buddy steps forward through the crowd. If she’s scared, she doesn’t show it. She looks as bold as ever. “That’s an interesting threat, darling, but I’m afraid you’ve already shown your hand; if you need this ‘galactic radical’ from us, then—”

“Agent M-7,” Agent G cuts her off, “run a tactical scan and advise?” 

One of the agents next to them nods and presses a few buttons on their comms. It beeps rapidly, and Agent G looks over their shoulder. 

“Good,” they say, mildly disinterestedly, “If any of them move, agents, you are authorised to kill in this order until they comply; Vespa Ilkay, then Jet Siquliak, then Rita—”

“Alright, agent,” Buddy says, her voice cold. “Everyone. Weapons down.” 

Vespa growls. Those of the crew that  _ aren’t _ currently strapped in a goddamn wheelchair all lean down, dropping their weapons on the floor. Apart from Rita.

“But, but, but, I ain’t got anything!” she shouts.

“Then stay as still as you can, darling. It will be alright,” Buddy says.

Agent G looks over them all suspiciously. “Keep your blasters trained on them, Agents,” they say, “Sikuliaq and Ilkay particularly.”

As Agent G turns around and raises their comms to her ear, Juno glances over at Nureyev. 

He isn’t looking nervous. No, that’s not right. He’s looking nervous, but not in the way he should. Like he’s preparing for an audition, not standing at the barrel end of a gun. And he was the only one that the agents didn’t mention by name, either — except for Juno himself, but he figures  _ that’s  _ because a sick lady doesn’t pose much of a tactical threat.

Nureyev should. An unknown assailant amongst a group of high-ranking thieves is always a wildcard. They should’ve taken interest in him immediately. And yet…

Nureyev glances his way, and Juno narrows his eye at him. Nureyev blinks and looks away, and then the door opens. 

When Juno looks back to see who is walking through it, he almost falls out of his chair. 

Sasha Wire. It’s been years since Juno last saw her, and she’s changed. Hardened around the jaw. She carries herself with more power than ever before.

“Director W,” Agent G says, “These are the thieves I told you about.”

If anything, Sasha sounds bored. “Thank you, Agent. But I’m afraid the terms of our deal have changed.”

And just like that, she pulls out a blaster. Agent G has a second to look confused, to ask a bewildered “Director, what are you—”

And then she’s dead.

Sasha turns to one of the others next to her, “Report back to headquarters that Agent G has been terminated for incompetence. Cause of death was one three-fifths charge from a Model 800 W-PPK blaster.”

Sasha turns back to the group of them. Then she stretches out her arm, and points. “You,” she says.

Peter Nureyev steps forwards. 

_ “You _ ,” Vespa hisses at him as he passes her, but when she goes to reach out an Agent cocks her gun at her and she leans back again, growling like she can barely contain herself. 

“I believe the terms of our agreement have changed,” Nureyev says warily. The way he’s eyeing Sasha makes Juno think he’s got some sort of escape plan, somewhere, but honestly Juno’s too frightened and heartbroken to do anything but watch, helplessly. Peter Nureyev and Sasha Wire, two people he loves in different ways working together against him. It’s like a nightmare. 

“Correct,” Sasha says, and smiles. “You drive a bold bargain, Mr. Nureyev. A group of thieves let back on the loose and a debt forgiven in return for the map, the key, the book, the blade… and of course, the thief.”

“I have the items you’re looking for stored in the garage,” Nureyev says matter-of-factly. If he’s nervous, he doesn’t show it. “And what’s more, I know how to use them to find the Curemother prime. If you’ll allow me to work with you, I can guide you all the way to the prime myself.”

What’s he doing? Surely Dark Matters  _ knows  _ they have the Curemother prime. There’s no way they’ll eat up his lie about the group having got that far yet. Juno can feel his heart in his throat.

Sasha looks him up and down, “How do we know that you can honestly do what you claim to be able to do?” 

“Because if I don’t, you’ll kill me,” Nureyev shrugs easily, “I’ve already given you my assurance. You know my name. That gives you virtually complete power over me.”

“We do have that,” the smile Sasha gives him is decidedly cruel, and giddy about it. “Peter Nureyev. The dark chapter in the Brahmese government’s history, in the flesh. They’re going to pay very nicely for you once your usefulness for Dark Matters runs itself thin.”

“I plan never to let that happen,” Nureyev says.

“My question is simply why?” Sasha asks, “Why turn yourself in after twenty years of running from the law, just to save the backs of a bunch of thieves you had bartered your own freedom in exchange for?”

The same question is in Juno’s throat, too, and when Nureyev looks over and locks eyes with him, he feels a lump in his throat. He shakes his head a little, and Nureyev only gives him a small smile.

“Because,” he says, “I fell in love with one of them.” 

“Ugh,” Sasha says, and raises her blaster to Nureyev’s temple, “Typical.” 

She shoots. Juno shouts, and before he can finish letting Nureyev’s name out of his mouth, something begins to shift in his body. He sees a glimpse of Nureyev’s lean form crumpling to the floor, and then his vision goes dark.


	12. ambrosia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU !!
> 
> Thank you everyone for all the love this fic has received and all of your comments. They have made my day countless times and I have loved hearing all of your reactions. I'm gonna miss this fic so much and if I could I would delay posting this chapter by like three weeks just so it didn't have to end haha. But it does! And I look forward to hearing your reactions :-)
> 
> Thank you again to Danny and Lex for being the best beta-readers ever, this fic would've been so much worse without them. To Amy, Dav, and Elle for hyping me up, and Sav for their help with sensitivity reading as well.
> 
> THIS CHAPTER IS WHERE THE GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE TAG COMES IN. Please be aware of that!

When Nureyev starts to come to, the first thing that he feels is the crick in his neck. Then he realises that’s  _ all  _ he can feel in his body. 

It’s been a while since he’s been stunned, but it’s by no means his first time recovering from a stun blast without proper medical attention. 

When he pulls his eyes open, he can see that his body is folded in on itself like he’s been dumped unceremoniously in the corner. He can already tell the first feeling he’ll get back in his limbs will be pain. 

Well. He has to say that this isn’t exactly what he had planned. He had thought that he’d handled the entire situation with Dark Matters fairly well. It had been easy to find the sound probe that they’d planted on the ship after the shapeshifting bot they sent after them had put it there (a move to try and keep an eye on his progress, how demeaning), and move it out of the medbay so that his lie about the crew not having yet obtained the Curemother prime would be accepted smoothly. He had convinced Director Wire that he was the only person able to lead them to the prime himself.

The plan had always been a little risky, a little stupid, but he had been certain in his ability to escape from Dark Matters once he had spent enough time marinating Director Wire to see him as trustworthy. He is beginning to think he has made a fatal error in his judgement. Director Wire has changed since the last time he interacted with her as Rex Glass.

He’s right about the pain. A few minutes of lying on the floor beating himself into the ground mentally later, he is hit suddenly by a wave of it, starting from the side of his neck where the blaster hit him and traveling down to his feet. He arcs and groans, and at that moment, the speaker in the holding cell crackles to life.

“Peter Nureyev,” Director Wire’s voice comes through cheerily. “I hope you’ve realised by now that your attempt to fool Dark Matters has been unsuccessful. It was stupid of you to imagine you ever could have.”

“I had rather assumed it would be as easy as it was last time,” Nureyev says, unsure if Sasha can actually hear him. Whether or not she can, she continues as though he hasn’t said anything at all.

“Your attempt to have Dark Matters believe that the Curemother prime had not been stolen by the Aurinkos was at best amateurish. Our team is currently searching the vessel known as the Carte Blanche and we will not rest until it is found. We have already obtained the four items you tried to have us believe would not be useful without your input. It seems, Peter Nureyev, that Dark Matters has no use for you.”

“I have more secrets up my sleeve than just the location of the Curemother prime,” Nureyev tries not to let his voice shake. 

“We don’t doubt that. Don’t worry. Here at Dark Matters, we’re going to take special care to ensure that everything you know has been extracted before we hand you over to the Brahmese authorities. I hear they are _very_ excited to see you again.” 

Nureyev can’t hide away the fear that ripples through his body. It’s powerful and all-consuming, so much so that for a moment all he can hear is a high-pitched squealing in his ears. “And Juno?” he hears himself say. 

“The condition of Detective Steel is none of your business,” Director Wire says, and then her voice turns cold. “I have not forgotten the role you played in getting him dragged into a life of crime, Agent Glass.”

Nureyev closes his eyes. He had always expected his life would end in some dramatic way, but he can’t help himself but be angry for this. It is one thing to have someone else’s skills outmatch your own, or to have yourself grow inevitably weaker until you are caught up with. It is another thing entirely to have willingly given yourself over to the enemy in the name of a pretty face. Almost every iteration of the person Peter Nureyev has been over the years hates himself for this. 

All except the seventeen year old idealist that has been living in the back of his mind for twenty years. That foolish boy in him who believes in doing things for other people’s sake. Including give himself up to the enemy.  _ Well, Pete,  _ the voice that berates him in his head is distinctly owlish.  _ I hope it was worth it. _

“Someone will be in within the hour to begin the process of information extraction,” the way Sasha’s voice sounds makes Nureyev think that information extraction will be incredibly painful, and that this is a fact she takes a lot of glee out of. “We—”

And then she stops talking, because the power in Nureyev’s cell cuts out. 

The lights go dark. Nureyev can hear himself breathing in the enclosed space of the cell, and then he hears a laser strike down the hall. He jolts.

He tests his ability to stand. His legs are still shaky, but with one hand on the wall he manages to make it to his feet. He can hear the gunfire getting closer, and then he hears a distant scream. 

The PA system in his room flickers on. “Mista Euanthe!” screeches a voice that floods Nureyev’s entire body with relief, “I can’t believe you did that! Oh, it was just like a scene from a movie! At first you got zapped and I was all scared and hurt and confused, and then Mista Steel started coughing and coughing—”

“Is Juno alright?” Nureyev asks, and Rita seems snapped out of her daze.

“There’s no time for that! You gotta get outta here real fast. Miss Vespa’s coming for you but I ain’t gonna be able to keep the lights off for long, Dark Matters’re real good at setting things back up again and locking me out quickly.” 

“I don’t have any of my weapons,” Nureyev pats his pockets.

“Miss Vespa’s got a knife for you. Now I gotta go and keep working on the rest of the servers to make sure all the right doors are gonna lock and unlock for you. Captain Aurinko’s takin’ care of the rest of the agents back here and Mista Jet took the car and the Curemother to hide before he comes to pick you up. Good luck!”

“Who’s with Juno?” Nureyev asks, but the PA system dies out before Rita can answer him. Nureyev poses near the door of his cell, ready for what he might be faced with if and when the door opens. 

A moment later, his ears perk up at the sound of a thud right outside his cell. Someone gets out half a shout of “Hey!” before the tell-tale sounds of a cut throat start gurgling faintly.

The door slides open. 

Vespa is shining with blood. Her eyes are wild and the first thing she does is walk right up to Nureyev and push him down onto the ground.

“I oughta skin you alive, thief,” she spits. “For everything you’ve done. You were going to sell us out.”

Nureyev swallows, “Vespa, I promise—”

“Save it. Only reason I’m here to get you is cause of Buddy, but she’s not gonna be  _ that  _ mad if I make it out and leave you a corpse behind me. Don’t you think we’re gonna be letting you off the hook for this one. Do yourself a favour and don’t push any of my goddamn buttons, you hear me?” 

She drops a knife onto his chest. Nureyev nods quickly and picks it up, getting to his feet. 

“Real classy stunt you pulled back there. If you start to feel like you’d rather hand yourself over to Dark Matters instead of dealing with your goddamn problems again on the way out, give me a little warning this time.”

“Vespa,” Nureyev says, and catches her wrist as she makes for the door. She whips around with fire in her eyes, but he continues evenly, “Thank you. I hope I can make this up to you.”

“You can start by not fucking up our chance at escape,” she wrenches her wrist out of his grip. “Let’s  _ go _ .”

Vespa sprints out into the hall, Nureyev following close behind. 

Vespa has a blaster on her hip as well as the knife in her holster. Nureyev has never seen her use a blaster before. The question of why she has one only has half a second to register in his head before the light above them turns on and Vespa pulls out her gun, shooting it. Sparks of orange and glass shards float down around them like a particularly nasty snowstorm and Vespa growls, “Don’t slow down, what is wrong with you?” 

They turn the corner and find themselves face to face with two guards. Instinct takes over Nureyev then— he has his hand around one’s wrist before he has a chance to pull out a blaster. A deft kick to the stomach sends him reeling back long enough for Nureyev to pull out the knife Vespa gave him and throw it. It lands in the meat of the agent’s neck. Blood pulses out of the body as it stumbles to the ground, and Nureyev steps forward to pull the knife out.

“Jesus. That was gruesome even for me,” Vespa says from just to the side of him, and he glances over in time to see her wrench her knife from between the cracks of the chest plate of the other guard’s armour. 

“You want to get out of here alive, yes?” Nureyev shoots back, wiping the bloody knife on his shirt.

They keep running through the halls. As they move, doors keep opening and closing around them, no doubt the work of their master hacker as she guides them through the labyrinth of the interstellar cruiser. It’s an enormous ship, and Nureyev can hear the marching feet of guards pouring towards them from all angles as they run.

Rescuing him was almost certainly a suicide mission. It crosses Nureyev’s mind that it makes no tactical sense for Captain Aurinko to have let Vespa go after him. There’s a high chance they won’t make it out of this ship alive—and the only benefit if they do is saving a man who tried to sell them out to their greatest enemy. 

Would Nureyev do the same for these people as they are doing for him? Does he even deserve to be saved?

He keeps running. 

A light flickers on in front of them. Vespa goes to shoot it, but then all of the other lights in the hallway turn on at once. An alarm begins to blare somewhere in the belly of the ship. Around them, every door that had been closed slides open.

“Shit!” Vespa spits, “They must’ve kicked Rita out of the system.” 

“What do we do?” Nureyev asks.

“Keep goddamn running. And get ready to fight.”

He doesn’t have long to prepare; they meet the first guards as soon as they round the next corner. Five of them are standing in the hall, each one looking nastier than the last. They’re heavily armoured. Even with Nureyev’s finest knife work, he’ll have to be up closer, and each of them is already reaching for their blaster. 

Vespa fires a shot first. It sinks into the chest plate of a guard, who does little more than smirk and aim her gun right back. Nureyev aims a kick that sends the blaster scattering across the ground, but by that time another three guards have swarmed him. 

Nureyev lashes out with his knife. He catches two across the face, and when they flail, they hit the third, sending them all stumbling. A shot rings out, and he can smell the sizzle of a plasma blast too close for comfort.

The two guards he slashed have blood in their eyes. It’s the work of an instant to disarm them, and a second instant to send them to the floor. He can hear the sound of a knife in skin behind him, and knows that Vespa has dispatched the third. But more guards are pouring into the room. 

“Shit,” Nureyev hisses, “We can’t take all of them.”

“Shut up,” Vespa growls. 

“Peter Nureyev. Vespa Ilkay,” the leader of this new swarm of guards steps forwards, “Drop your weapons and submit immediately, or we will have no choice but to exact lethal force.” 

These guards are even more armoured than the last. Nureyev has a lifetime’s experience in strategy, and the calculations occur in an instant. This is it.

Until the PA system crackles to life, and a reassuringly familiar cackle floats through it. The lights go off in the room again, and then the hallway is set ablaze. 

Shots ring out in the dark like fireworks. Nureyev drops as flat to the ground as he can, and feels Vespa beside him doing the same. Two guards scream and their bodies hit the floor with a thud. The hallway flashes bright blue and dark again, bright blue and dark again. 

“Who the hell…?” Vespa mutters, “Nobody can shoot a guard in the two goddamn places on their body that aren’t armoured in the dark.” 

Nureyev feels something swell in his chest. “Well,” he says, “I know of one person who could’ve, back when I first met him.” 

There’s a final scream and thud, and then the lights in the hallway flicker on. 

Buddy stands in all her fiery glory in the middle of the hallway, her blaster still smoking. Leaning heavily on her shoulder, panting for breath… is Juno. His blaster is smoking, too, and there’s a wild grin on his face. 

Nureyev gets to his feet and rushes forward, and as he does, Juno steps free of Buddy’s grip.

“You’re a goddamn idiot,” Juno growls the second Nureyev gets close enough, and reaches out and shoves him. Nureyev stumbles back, and almost trips over the arm of a fallen guard when Juno grabs him by the lapels of his shirt, pulling him upright and then forward into a kiss. 

He tastes like perfume. Nureyev’s never liked the taste of flowers more in his entire life. Time seems to slow. He frames Juno’s face in his hands and leans fully into him, making him stumble back a little and his arms tighten around Nureyev’s torso. 

“Jesus—hey, lovebirds?” Vespa shouts, “We’re still the middle of a Dark Matters facility, here.”

“And as glad as I am that the two of you have kissed and made up, Pete, don’t think you’re going to be welcomed back to the Carte Blanche with open arms,” Buddy adds, and Nureyev parts from the kiss and nods at her.

“That’s… perfectly understandable, Captain.”

“Good,” Buddy says. “Well, then. I have no intention of not getting out of here alive. What’s say we get started on our daring escape?” 

“How did you get back into the Dark Matters servers?” Nureyev asks as they run. Doors have started to open and close around them again, lights in every hallway flicking on and off as they pass through them.

“We secured the blade when we regained control of the Carte Blanche,” Buddy shouts back at him, “Our talented hacker was more than excited at the chance of being able to test it out.” 

“And how did you regain control of the ship? I thought for sure they would have captured you all.”

“They tried,” Vespa replies, and her grin is sharp and pleased. “Locked us all up separately. They knew I’d be the one with the best chance of getting outta there by myself, so they kept a close eye on me. When I started planning my escape, they told me I’d have to be nuts to even try.” She shrugs, “Good thing I am.” 

“And—” Nureyev starts, but he’s cut off by Juno, a few steps ahead of him.

“Maybe we save the questioning for later, babe?” he calls out, and Nureyev tries not to trip over his own feet at the pet name.

“I—yes. Yes, alright,” he says, and Vespa rolls her eyes at him. 

They run in uniform after that. Juno starts to stumble, and Buddy has to link her arm under his shoulder and keep him upright as they run. It slows them all down, but thanks to Rita’s work only a few stragglers of guards get through their defences, and every time Juno has them on the floor before they can even think about getting close enough to attack any one of them.

They make an impressive team, the six of them. An unmatchable team. It’s a powerful feeling, and it rises through Nureyev’s gut and puts an extra spring in his step. Despite the mistakes he’s made, he feels confident in one thing: he wants to make it up to this family. He wants to spend the rest of his years with them, carving through impossible heists and toppling untouchable giants. He wants the wealthy to fear him, and those in need to call for him. He wants the universe to know the names Peter Nureyev and Juno Steel.

Juno glances over his shoulder and sends Nureyev a wink. Nureyev grins back. 

He has a feeling it’s going to be amazing. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 🌹

**Author's Note:**

> If you read this far, drop a comment or kudos maybe?


End file.
